by Cesar Aira
The time flew by. The rain, the poring over maps, the consulting with emissaries all served to fill an improbable few days of inactivity. Gauna was pursuing his own aims (but the Widow did not appear), Carlos discovered countless amusements among the nations who were thus thrown together and having a wild time of it in the rain (though there was not a word about his Yñuy), and Clarke did not budge from the war council, soon becoming their chief adviser. He was irritated by the irrationality that governed the savages, but he had seen worse, and as long as they were not fighting for real, there was no serious harm done. He had only a slight problem with one of the chieftains, a short, almost dwarfish Indian by the name of Maciel, and that was over something extraordinarily silly. It so happened that they regularly held their meetings beneath a rectangular covering supported on four posts. The rain collected in the center of this awning, and they tipped the water out whenever it threatened to spill over them. They did not have to do this very often, as a fire lit directly under the bulge evaporated most of the water. This was a ridiculous system, but the Indians preferred it to the normal one of having a sloping cover, which they said would mean that water was constantly dripping off one end and splashing them. Once, when Clarke got up to ease the stiffness out of his legs after several hours of sitting down, he stood up so hastily that he bumped into the roof, which at that moment was heavy with water. His action caused a great stream of it to cascade down one side, so that a freezing jet of water struck Maciel full in the back. Since the savage was in a complete daydream at the time, the sudden soaking made him cry out in shock. He wanted to cut Clarke’s throat on the spot, and it was all the others could do to calm him down. After that, as is so often the case, the two men became the closest of friends. As well as being irascible, this dwarf was a habitual drunkard, and his drunken fantasies focused with a maniacal inevitability on Clarke, who he said reminded him of his father.
One other thing disturbed the Englishman, and that was the readiness with which the Indians executed spies. They went too far. Even the slightest suspicion led to yet another throat-slitting. The last straw was when they summarily sentenced to death a poor Indian caught some distance from the camp carrying nothing more suspicious than a sack of dahlia bulbs. Clarke made it his personal responsibility to get him pardoned. It was pretty obvious that the fellow was no spy or anything of the kind. But the savages around the leaders’ fire insisted on cutting his throat. Although their reasons for doing so were nonexistent, when challenged they invented some. One of them came up with the idea that the bulbs were a coded message based on how many of them there were, their size, and even the bits of dirt they had on them (he could not prove any of this, because both bag and contents had been stolen). Another chief suggested it might be a delayed-action message: when the dahlias bloomed, the enemy might read its meaning in their colors. Clarke replied that was the most absurd idea he had ever heard. It made no difference. He fell back on an argument which he considered of central importance: saving a life with a view to the future. The Indians laughed wholeheartedly at this. They told him it was like prohibiting an Englishman from taking tea in order to save the parliamentary system. The argument was complicated still further by a spurious discussion as to whether it was more correct to use the word “bulb” (in Mapuche) or “tuber,” which was more graphic. However ridiculous it might seem, they spent three hours of byzantine discussion going over and over this point. In the end, they cut the poor unfortunate’s throat.
“Are you happy now, are you satisfied?” Clarke asked them angrily.
Yes. They were delighted. They even had the gall to add: “We discovered something interesting: bulb smuggling carries the death penalty.”
At this, they all started to laugh, even Maciel, who until then had been the only one to take Clarke’s side, not because he was convinced but rather out of a fantasy of friendship. Curiously, Clarke quickly got over the incident; at other times in his life he would have left, slamming the door behind him. There might have been several reasons for him not doing so on this occasion, but perhaps the main one was that there was no door to slam, nor indeed any “outside” for him to exit to. This made a great difference. To a large extent, it was impossible to blame the Indians. Not because they were innocent or stupid, but simply due to this lack of an inside or outside for his not inconsiderable intelligence to latch onto.
Due to the urgency of the situation and the prestige he enjoyed as a shaman and close friend of Cafulcurá, Mallén was the natural focal point for all the deliberations. These went on endlessly, largely because there was nothing else to do. But Mallén pushed Clarke to the fore with a constant stream of requests for advice. The Englishman adapted his counsel to what the Indians considered logical, but as he himself had a quite different logic, and as their pampa way of arguing was for him simply play-acting, something in him was plainly still au dessus de la mêlée, was ready, even if only in theory, to change opinion in an instant, to switch sides without the slightest reason; and this was precisely what the Indians most respected. Simultaneity brought the collapse of necessity. It was as though the narrative were being erased. All links between events were blown away. With the light of reason dimmed, all kinds of causal shifts took place, and they seemed to concentrate on one man, who was Clarke. An aura surrounded him. So much so that when after four days of waiting on the banks of the Rainy One the time was ripe for them to unite all their forces to crush Coliqueo, thanks to an almost silent decision, which seemed so natural there was no need to vote on it, the Englishman was invested with the rank and responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief of the allied armies of the Huilliche-Tehuelche confederation.
11: The War of the Hare
The entire war lasted no more than a week, and ended with a sweeping victory for the Huilliches. Yet another triumph in the career of the legendary Cafulcurá, this time undeserved, one that fell into his lap gratuitously, but proof of his genius anyway: he had after all been the motive, the reason, the excuse for the war, and everyone knows that in war the be-all and end-all of strategy is to become invisible. According to rough estimates, subject of course to immense variations, one hundred thousand warriors took part in the struggle. Nobody even thought of counting the dead, but there must have been a great many of them, as the whole point of the war was to kill each other. From start to finish, the weather was atrocious, truly English: rain, fog, not so much as a glimpse of the sun, cold winds which heralded or mimicked winter in the midst of autumn. It seemed as though everyone was in a hurry to get the whole thing over with, just so that the weather could return to normal. Haste became the chief characteristic of what came to be known in the collective memory as the War of the Hare. The reason for the name was soon lost in more or less bewildered suppositions by everyone except Clarke, for whom it had a very precise meaning: he in turn was dumbfounded as to how this meaning had somehow transferred itself from his subjective consciousness to a general acceptance. In fact, this was the least of the mysteries that went unanswered. Clarke got used to this being the case. He came to think he was up against the apotheosis of the simultaneity of nonsense. He was the center and driving force of everything that happened, but since the outcome inevitably took him by surprise, he ended up washing his hands of it all. He gave in to the tumult of the instant so naturally that it seemed he had been doing so throughout his life. From the outset, he rejected the classic position of the general who hovers high above the entire battlefield: he was no eagle, and anyway the pampa, with its complete lack of topographical features, did not lend itself to such a perspective. In itself it was pure terrain, a geometry: it would have been superfluous to deliberately treat it as such. Indeed, it would have been counterproductive, a waste. The armies maneuvered in a space whose gradients they themselves produced and instantly inverted. Everything was a question of creating lines, as quickly as possible; lines of arrival and departure, which magically intersected each other at every point rather than at any especially privileged one. It was like having
to deal with the most eternal aspect of war, as a natural epiphenomenon of thought; to hasten life until it merged with death, and to keep this action concealed from the adversary. The key was to imagine the grandeur of destiny infinitely compressed until it was the size and shape of a rock crystal; the large and the small, the distant and the near, necessity and freedom. Quite how Clarke succeeded in doing this, to see clearly where anybody else would have got lost a thousand times, could only be called a miracle. But not for him. He constructed his own system, adhered to the lines, the horizontals and verticals, to the poetry of destiny, and with cheerful insistence let things happen.
The first issue was the deployment of troops. Since no one wanted to take the initiative, Clarke called a war council. The different armies were drawn up a certain distance away. For them to deploy, it was necessary to actually move, rather than rely on the customary toing-and-froing of messages. Clarke’s colleagues on the war council did not like this idea: in their view, it was tempting fate for bodies, the physical matter of human beings, to take the place of immaterial messages. They were afraid of seeming ridiculous. The Englishman would hear nothing of this, and so of course they yielded to him. One of their good qualities was that once they decided on something, or had it decided for them, they launched into instant, tumultuous action. So it was that in the twinkling of an eye the huge mass of some ten thousand Indians and an equal number of cattle got on the move. And at a gallop. The rain also helped drive them on. There was something slippery about the whole affair: no one could avoid tumbling into it. They went too far in their use of grease, which helped keep off the wet. It was amazing how much fat they could get out of even the leanest cow they slaughtered. They stored it, with a touch of unconscious humor, in big tins of English tea: every Indian had one to keep his supply in. Adept at practical matters, it took them only two minutes and two hands to renew their covering from head to toe. Then they shone like the outside of a window on a rainy afternoon. They invited the white men to do the same for practical reasons. Carlos Alzaga Prior had no qualms about stripping off and smearing himself all over. Clarke flatly refused at first, but the sensation of his wet, heavy clothing on his body the whole time, and the sight on the second day of Gauna anointed and glistening like a savage, finally persuaded him to try. It suited him. With his dark coloring, his black hair that had grown out of all recognition during the expedition, and his stocky build, he looked like any other Indian once he was smothered in grease and sat naked on his horse. He even rather liked the idea: it lent an air of carnival or masked ball to the whole affair; like every commander-in-chief, he was keen to make things seem a little less serious than they were, just in case. He borrowed the grease, and kept his clothing folded and dry in his own tea chest, ready to resume his identity as an English naturalist at any moment. Carlos even began to take lessons in how to throw bolas, the Huilliches’ main weapon.
Their first march took them to the spot where Coliqueo’s seasonal camp had been pitched. Coliqueo’s men were no longer there (a fact which the allies already knew: according to their information, his army had withdrawn some fifty leagues to the north) but they soon ran into a large raiding party which was hastening to cut off their advance. The first battle was fought under a blanket of dense white clouds and drizzle. The combat itself lasted barely three or four minutes. There were no more than a thousand enemy troops, but in the general confusion their own superior numbers seemed unimportant. The two forces became completely entangled: as soon as they saw each other on their respective horizons, they charged straight at one another. Both sides went clean through the enemy lines, and then scattered in every direction, fleeing but also fighting, caught up in extravagant chases that eventually formed one huge circle. The combat as such was over. The allies went to round up the cattle that had been scared off, then lit fires for dinner. A short while later, the Vorogas came to carry off their dead. The Huilliches buried their own in funeral ceremonies that same night. They committed the atrocity of skinning live horses to wrap the dead bodies in. Clarke was sure he would go on hearing the cries of those poor animals until Judgment Day. Everyone got stupendously drunk. The chiefs and the Englishman spent the night issuing and receiving messages. As baptisms of fire go, it had been passable. Gauna had stayed neutral, Carlos was unhurt and full of himself. Clarke had fired barely a dozen shots.
From that point on, Clarke began to understand something which reassured him completely with regard to simultaneity: it was subordinate to the narrative. It was this which gave it a structure, a perspective, made it comprehensible, and at the same time removed the terror of the moment from it. It confirmed the fact that it was unrepeatable, but made this acceptable. Deep down, it meant always contributing to the narrative, which became one long repetition. Although it seemed as if the Indians were caught up in the overwhelming present, they in fact relied on the goodwill of a narrator for their activity to exist in reality. The spectacle of the ducks convinced Clarke he was right. In order to see them, the idea had first to take shape in space, and this suddenly led the whole army to travel an incredible distance, without greatly changing the thoughtful calm that the movement emerged from. This was the Great Sine Curve of the Mapuche armies, a line that would have exploded the maps if anyone had tried to trace it. In his youth, Clarke had been an enthusiastic student of the campaigns led by Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and of course Napoleon, which he knew by heart. He attempted to put what he had learned into practice, knowing full well that things would turn out differently on the pampas. And so it proved. Not even ten Europes laid side by side would have been sufficient to contain the Great Sine Curve. It was a movement that embraced all other movements, past and future. Without even catching sight of the enemy, they struck terror into them, they surrounded them a thousand times, they cut off all their lines of retreat, even ones they would never have dreamt of using. Finally there came a moment when their army touched the absolute tangent, the sea. This was such a novelty that they halted there for a full day. For many of the Indians, this was the first time they had seen the sea, and they were left awestruck, fascinated, even though the thick mists robbed the sight of much of its grandeur. If it had not been raining, they would have gone for a swim. They did so anyway. Several of them drowned, carried away unsuspecting by the pull of the waves. As night was falling, a party of Indians who had been exploring the shore appeared at the generals’ bonfire and told them excitedly that something extraordinary was taking place on some nearby rocks. Clarke climbed on to Repetido and sent for Carlos, whom he felt obliged to show anything of interest. The youngster did not appear, but when Clarke arrived at the spot, he found him already among the crowd of spectators. They were all gathered at the top of some high cliffs, from the edge of which a small, inaccessible beach could be seen. On it were about a hundred grotesquely large ducks. Even allowing for the distance, they must have been at least five feet tall, like overgrown children. They were plump to the point of bursting, with snowy white down, huge blue eyes, and broad webbed feet that they planted firmly (they must have weighed at least one hundred and seventy-five pounds) into the wet sand. The first impression they gave was that they must be dwarves in disguise. But how on earth could a hundred dwarves be got together like that? And Clarke had never heard mention of any pygmy races on American soil.
“They’re not ducks,” said Maciel, who had ridden with him. “They’re seagulls, which are quite similar.”
“What about their bills then?”
“Well, they’re spoonbill gulls.”
Colqán, the aristocratic Tehuelche, burst out laughing. According to him, they were ducks all right, and not even particularly large ones; it was certain substances that the Indians had taken which made them see everything out of proportion. Clarke said nothing in reply, but he was convinced this was not the case. At any rate, even leaving aside the question of their size, the ducks were behaving in the most extraordinary fashion. They were walking very erect, like geese,
with long, determined strides; even though there was no apparent pattern to their progress, there must have been a secret one. It was a shame it was so misty, because this meant he missed important details. The ducks were walking round and round. All of a sudden the onlookers could see an enormous white egg about the size of a feather bolster. It was obvious now that some kind of ritual was taking place. Although animals do of course perform rituals, and even highly complicated ones, this only increased the impression of artificiality. As soon as they saw the egg, the Indians stopped laughing and commenting. It was as if this colossal egg bewitched them even more than the sea had done. Clarke remembered some of the things Coliqueo had told him: the exact content of his ramblings was of little importance, it was enough to know that a duck’s egg had been part of his grand scheme of things. Coliqueo, who like every emperor overdid the medicinal herbs, had made it seem like a hallucination; but it was in fact real, and Colqán was wrong.
