an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

by Cesar Aira

  He regained consciousness that afternoon, too soon for it to be in any way advantageous. He woke to pain such as he had never felt before, and against which he was defenseless. The first twenty-four hours were one long howl of pain. All the remedies they tried were useless, although there was not much they could try, apart from compresses and good will. Krause wrung his hands; like his friend, he neither slept nor ate. They had sent for the doctor from San Luis, who arrived the following night in the pouring rain on a horse flogged half to death. They spent the next day transporting the patient to the provincial capital, in a carriage sent by His Excellency the governor. The doctor's diagnosis was cautious. In his opinion the acute pain was caused by the exposure of a nerve ending, which would be encapsulated sooner or later. Then the patient would recover his powers of speech and be able to communicate, which would make the situation less distressing. The wounds would be stitched up at the hospital and the extent of the scarring would depend on the responsiveness of the tissue. The rest was in God's hands. He had brought morphine and administered a generous dose, so Rugendas fell asleep in the carriage and was spared the uncertainties of a night journey through quagmires. He woke in the hospital, just as they were stitching him up, and had to be given a double dose to keep him quiet.

  A week went by. They took the stitches out and the healing proceeded rapidly. They were able to remove the bandages and the patient began to eat solids. Krause never left his side. The San Luis hospital was a ranch on the outskirts of the city, inhabited by half a dozen monsters, half- man half-animal, the results of cumulative genetic accidents. There was no way to cure them. The hospital was their home. It was an unforgettable fortnight for Rugendas. The sensations impinging on the raw, pink flesh of his head were recorded indelibly. As soon as he could stand and go out for a walk on Krause's arm, he refused to go back in. The governor, who had surrounded the great artist with attentions, offered his hospitality. Two days later Rugendas began to ride again and write letters (the first was to his sister in Augsburg, presenting his misfortunes in an almost idyllic light; by contrast, the picture he painted for his friends in Chile was resolutely grim).They decided to leave without delay. But not to follow their original route: the unknown immensity separating them from Buenos Aires was a challenge they would have to postpone. They would return to Santiago, the nearest place where Rugendas could receive proper medical treatment.

  For his recovery, though miraculous, was far from complete. He had hoisted himself out of the deep pit of death with the vigor of a titan, but the ascent had taken its toll. Leaving aside the state of his face for the moment, the exposed nerve, which had caused the unbearable suffering of the first days, had been encapsulated, but although this meant the end of the acute phase, the nerve ending had reconnected, more or less at random, to a node in the frontal lobe, from which it emitted prodigious migraines. They came on suddenly, several times a day; everything went flat, then began to fold like a screen. The sensation grew and grew, overpowering him; he began to cry out in pain and often fell over. There was a high-pitched squealing in his ears. He would never have imagined that his nervous system could produce so much pain; it was a revelation of what his body could do. He had to take massive doses of morphine and the attacks left him fragile, as if perched on stilts, his hands and feet very far away. Little by little he began to reconstruct the accident, and was able to tell Krause about it. The horse had survived, and was still useful; in fact, it was the one he usually chose to ride. He renamed it Flash. Sitting on its back he thought he could feel the ebbing rush of the universal plasma. Far from holding a grudge against the horse, he had grown fond of it. They were fellow survivors of electricity. As the analgesic took effect, he resumed his drawing: he did not have to learn again, for he had lost none of his skill. It was another proof of art's indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the "bridge of dreams." He was not like his ancestor, who had to start over with his left hand. If only he had been so lucky! What bilateral symmetry could he resort to, when the nerve was pricking at the very center of his being?

  He would not have survived without the drug. It took him some time to metabolize it. He told Krause about the hallucinations it had caused during the first few days. As clearly as he was seeing his friend now, he had seen demonic animals all around him, sleeping and eating and relieving themselves (and even conversing in grunts and bleats!) ...

  Krause undeceived him: that part was real. Those monsters were the poor wretches interned for life in the San Luis hospital. Rugendas was stunned by this, until the onset of the next migraine. What an amazing coincidence! Or correspondence: it suggested that all nightmares, even the most absurd, were somehow connected with reality. He had another memory to recount, different in nature, although related. When they took the stitches out of his face, he was vividly aware of each thread coming loose. And in his addled, semi-conscious state, he felt as if they were removing all the threads that had controlled the puppets of his feelings, or the expressions that manifested them, which came to the same thing. Averting his gaze, Krause made no comment and hastened to change the subject. Which was not so easy: changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others. And in this case, change was a key part of the subject.

  For Rugendas's face had been seriously damaged. A large scar descended from the middle of his forehead to a piglet's nose, with one nostril higher than the other, and a net of red streaks spread all the way to his ears. His mouth had contracted to a rosebud puckered with furrows and folds. His chin had been shifted to the right, and transformed into one big dimple, like a soup-spoon. This devastation seemed to be irreversible, for the most part. Krause shuddered to think how fragile a face was. One blow and it was broken forever, like a porcelain vase. A character was more robust. A psychological disposition seemed eternal by comparison.

  Even so, he might have grown accustomed to that mask, talking to it, waiting for replies, even predicting them. But the worst thing was that the muscles, as Rugendas himself had intuited in his fantasy about the threads, no longer responded to his commands; each one moved autonomously. And they moved much more than normal. It must have been because of the damage to the nervous system. By chance, or perhaps by miracle, this damage was limited to Rugendas's face, but the contrast with his calm trunk and limbs made it all the more striking. The twitching would begin with a slight quiver, a trembling, then spread suddenly and within seconds his whole face was jerking in an uncontrollable St. Vitus's dance. It also changed color, or colors, becoming iridescent, full of violets, pinks and ochres, shifting constantly as in a kaleidoscope.

  Viewed from that protean rubber, the world must have looked different, thought Krause. Hallucinations colored not only Rugendas's recent memories but also the scenes of his daily life. On this subject, however, he remained discreet; he must have been still getting used to the symptoms. And no doubt he did not have time to follow a line of thought through to its conclusion, because of the attacks, which occurred once every three hours, on average. When the pain came on, he was possessed, swept away by an inner wind. He hardly needed to explain what was happening: it was all too visible, although he did say that in the grip of an attack he felt amorphous.

  A curious verbal coincidence: amorphous, morphine. The drug went on accumulating in his brain. With its help he began to practice his art again, and organized his routine around spells of pain-relief and drawing. In this way he recovered a certain degree of normality. The physiognomic procedure sustained his undiminished skill. The charmingly intimate landscapes of San Luis provided ideal subjects for his convalescent exercises. Nature, in its nineteen vegetal phases, adapted itself to his perception, enveloped with Edenic light: a morphine landscape.

  An artist always learns something from the practice of his art, even in the most constraining circumstances, and in this case Rugendas discovered an aspect of the physiognomic procedure that had so far escaped his notice. Namely that it wa
s based on repetition: fragments were reproduced identically, barely changing their location in the picture. If this was not immediately obvious, not even to the artist, it was because the size of the fragments varied enormously, from a single point to a panoramic view (which could greatly exceed the dimensions of the picture). In addition, the fragment's outline could be affected by perspective. As small and as large as the Taoist dragon.

  Like so many discoveries, this one seemed at first to be purely gratuitous. But perhaps one day it would have a practical application.

  After all, art was his secret. He had conquered it, although at an exorbitant price. He had paid with everything else in his life, so why not the accident and the subsequent transformation? In the game of repetitions and permutations, he could conceal himself even in his new state, and function unseen like any other avatar of the artist. Repetitions: in other words, the history of art.

  Why this obsession with being the best? Why did he have to assume that only quality could legitimize his work? In fact, he could hardly even begin to think about it except in terms of quality But what if he was making a mistake? Or indulging in an unhealthy fantasy? Why couldn't he be like everyone else (like Krause, for example), simply painting as well as he could and giving more weight to other things? That kind of modesty could have considerable effects; for a start it would allow him to practice other arts, should he wish ... or all of them. His medium could become life itself. The absolutist ambition came from Humboldt, who had designed the procedure as a universal knowledge machine. But that pedantic automaton could be dismantled without giving up the array of styles, each of which was a kind of action.

  Within ten days they were back in Mendoza (a journey of one hundred and fifty miles): they rode the same horses along the same route and passed the same carts, accompanied by the same guide and the same cook. The only thing that had changed was Rugendas's face. And the direction. They were slightly delayed by the rain, the wind and the way things looked the same. The Godoy family, notified of the ghastly incident weeks before, renewed their hospitality, but this time they tactfully provided a separate room, where the painter would have more peace and quiet, while still enjoying all the benefits of being in the family's care. His room was perched on the roof; it had once been a lookout, before the trees around the house blocked the view. They could offer him the use of it now because the heat was easing off (it was mid-March); in midsummer, it was a kiln.

  Solitude was good for him: he was beginning to cope on his own, and it was a relief to do without Krause for a whole day at a time—not that he was in any way annoyed by the presence of his faithful friend, who was an ideal companion, but because he wanted to leave him in peace, to let him go out and amuse himself in Mendoza after his bedside vigils. He abhorred the thought of being a burden. Secluded in his dovecote, he began to regain his self- esteem, in so far as it was possible.

  Those were days of introspection and soul-searching. He had to assimilate what had happened and try to find a viable way forward. He played out internal debates in his correspondence, to which he devoted a great deal of time. He filled pages and pages with his small, compact handwriting. Throughout his life he was a prolific letter-writer: clear, organized, explicit, precise. Nothing escaped him. As his letters have been preserved, there is no shortage of documentary material for his biographers, and although none of them has tried, it would be perfectly possible to reconstruct his travels day by day, almost hour by hour, following every movement of his spirit, every reaction, every scruple. The treasure-trove of his letters reveals a life without secrets, yet somehow still mysterious.

  There were two reasons for his feverish activity during those first days in Mendoza. He was behind in his correspondence, since all he had sent from San Luis were a few brief, faltering notes in a shaky hand, containing a bare minimum of information and making promises to elaborate later, which it was now time to fulfill. But he also needed to clarify things for himself and come to terms with the gravity of his situation, and the only means of doing so at his disposal was the familiar practice of letter- writing. That is why there is so much information directly or indirectly related to this episode, concerning not only the events themselves but also their intimate repercussions. The artist's mastery of documentation had carried over to the rest of his life, becoming second nature to the man.

  His first and principal correspondent was his sister Luise, back in his hometown of Augsburg. With her he was touchingly sincere. He had never hidden anything from her and could not see why he should do so now. Yet at this juncture he discovered that Luise could not take in the whole range of possible documentation. Or, rather: although she could (because there were no secrets between them), certain things would be left out. This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden. To use a modern term, which does not appear in the letters, we might call this a problem of "discursive form." As if he had been aware of it from the start, Rugendas had prudently built up a range of correspondents scattered around the globe. So now he resumed the task of writing to other addresses; among his interlocutors he counted physiognomic painters and naturalists, ranchers, farmers, journalists, housewives, rich collectors, ascetics and even national heroes. Each set the tone for a different version, but all the versions were his. The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition "I am a monster"? It was easy enough to set it down on paper. But transmitting its significance was far more difficult. In the case of his Chilean friends the problem was pressing, and he took particular care over his letters to them, especially the Guttikers, who had already written inviting him to stay at their house in Santiago, as he had before setting out on his journey a few months before. Since they would be seeing him shortly, he felt he had to warn them. The obvious thing to do in this case would have been to exaggerate, in order to diminish the surprise. But it was not easy to exaggerate, given the state of his face. He ran the risk of falling short, especially if they were allowing for obvious exaggeration. Which would make the surprise even worse.

  In any case, he certainly did not shut himself away. His body's natural regimen required a good deal of fresh air and exercise. And even in his semi-invalid state, in spite of the frequent migraines, the nervous attacks and the constant medication, it became imperative for him to dedicate the hours of good daylight to riding and painting the natural world. The faithful Krause never left his side, because the attacks could occur far from the house, in which case he would hoist Rugendas onto his own horse and gallop back, undaunted by the cries of pain. Those spectacular crises were not, however, the most remarkable aspect of their outings. Rugendas attracted a great deal of attention even when he was behaving with perfect calm and propriety. People gathered to look at him, and in half-civilized places like the picturesque environs of Mendoza, one could hardly expect discretion to be the rule. The children were not the worst, because the adults behaved like children too. They watched him intently drawing the large hydraulic devices used for irrigation (his latest enthusiasm), and they were consumed by the desire to see his papers. What did they imagine? As for Rugendas, each time he took up his pencil he had to resist the temptation to sketch himself.

  At summer's end the weather had attained ultimate perfection. The landscapes took on an infinite plasticity; the shifting light of the Cordillera enveloped them hour by hour, made them transparent, endless cascades of detail. The afternoon light, filtered by the imposing stone ramparts of the Andes, was a ghost of its morning self, an optics of the mind, inhabited by the untimely pinks of mid-afternoon.

  Twilight went on for ten or twelve hours. And during the friends' night walks, gusts of wind rearranged stars and mountains. If it was true, as the Buddhists said, that everything, even a stone, a dead
leaf or a blowfly, had already existed and would exist again, that everything was part of a great cycle of rebirths, then everything was a man, a single man on the scale of time. Any man, Buddha or a beggar, a god or a slave. Given sufficient time, all the elements of the universe would combine to form a man. This had major consequences for the procedure: for a start, it could not operate automatically like a transcendent mechanics, with each fragment being slotted into its predetermined place; each fragment could become any other, and the transformation would be accomplished not in the dimension of time but in that of meaning. This idea could give rise to a totally different conception of reality. In his work, Rugendas had come to the conclusion that the lines of a drawing should not represent corresponding lines in visible reality, in a one-to-one equivalence. On the contrary, the line's function was constructive. That was why the practice of drawing remained irreducible to thought, and why, although he had completely incorporated the procedure, he could continue to draw.

  The Godoys had still not grown accustomed to his new appearance. This was an interesting sign of things to come. People can get used to any deformity, even the most frightful, but when it is accompanied by an uncontrollable movement of the features, a fluid, senseless movement, habit has no stable base on which to build. Perception remains correspondingly fluid. Although sociable and talkative by nature, Rugendas began to retire shortly after dinner and spend the evenings on his own. This he could do without awkwardness, since he had a legitimate excuse: struck down by superhuman migraines, he was at first incapable of anything but writhing on the bed of his attic room ... and not only the bed, on the floor too, and the walls, and the ceiling ...when the medication took effect, he returned to his letters.

  In his writing he tried to be absolutely sincere. He reasoned as follows: in principle, telling the truth and lying require the same amount of effort, so why not tell the truth, without omissions or ambiguities? If only as an experiment. But this was easier to say than to do, especially since in this case the doing was a kind of saying.