Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  He could hear the soldiers shouting in the distance. They must have been swimming too, or washing the horses.

  A white and pink echidna came crawling up the bank but went back into the water when it saw him.

  Duval lit his pipe and smoked for a while, until the sun went completely red. Then he got dressed, unhurriedly, and began to walk back. He heard a tremendous uproar coming from the camp, so loud that he wondered for a moment if they hadn’t been ambushed. But then he heard laughter and the joyful shrieking of women’s voices. He suspected some prank on the part of the gauchos. Impelled by curiosity, he hurried on and, emerging from the undergrowth, was greatly surprised to find the soldiers in the river, forcibly bathing the women. The water at the fording place came up to their knees. In one big joyful frenzy, the men were using large bars of soap to cover the women with lather, then dunking them. If any tried to escape to the bank, they were pulled back in. The game had aroused the men, and the girls were rosy from giggling, full of wild charm.

  Lieutenant Lavalle, his clothes in a mess, was on the bank, reclining on a pink rock the size and shape of a crocodile, smoking and roaring with laughter. With a leer he cried out, telling the soldiers to take the women off into the bushes, since they would be on guard duty that night. There was a moment of silence. The sun had reddened both the water and the bodies emerging from it, casting a splendor already tempered by intimations of the suave and compact darkness to come. It was a moment of silence and tense, expectant stillness but there was no need to repeat the invitation: without drying off, the bathers disappeared into the tall grass on both banks of the river, and after a while began to reemerge, smiling stupidly, unsteady on their legs.

  They still had time to hunt a few small animals — beavers, otters, ducks — and the most adroit among them pursued black eels that were said to be very tasty. With the last light, they set up the spits and lit the fires. Lavalle, who had been drinking all afternoon and was more gone than usual, insisted that they build a bonfire on top of his mauve rock, and invited Duval to sit and dine with him. They rested their backs against the slightly coiled tail of that crocodile-like form, and the water’s bluish aura, or perhaps their sense of wellbeing, led them to adopt almost feminine poses. The aides pulled up a net containing bottles that had been left to chill in an icy pool. Then they brought the roasted game, which the lieutenant did not touch. The conversation was rather incoherent, and his gaze, adorned with tiny inverted flames, was sinister.

  It was an early, hurried dinner. As soon as the first really dense shadows gathered, the night watch began, with five times as many sentries as usual because the situation was especially perilous: they were surrounded by screens of quiet trees, but in that quiet was a whispering which could also hide things. It was the ideal place for an ambush, if you thought about it: the Indians would emerge from the camouflage with phosphorescent cheekbones and teeth painted black. The soldiers slipped away under the stars to take up their positions. Suddenly, the terrible din of the frogs began. A toad would occasionally interrupt them with mournful laughter, but then the little frogs resumed their song. Lavalle’s mood took a grotesque turn: he started laughing and cracking jokes, smoked a cigarette to put himself to sleep, then began to yell, giving the order to bring “the engineer’s fiancée.” Two soldiers, who were getting drunk beneath the stone reptile ran off to find her, and drag her no doubt from the arms of some corporal.

  It was, after all, a good excuse to escape from that drunkard’s insolent company. Duval took the woman as far away as he could, without going beyond the ring of sentries.

  The night was perfect. All the unknown constellations shone and glided through the gigantic sky, and when the moon came out, it covered the world with its dark pallor, which rouses some people and sends the rest to sleep. The frogs fell silent; then the moths and crickets sang, and when they too fell silent there was only the whistling of the owls in the overall quiet. Sleep and waking.

  Duval woke up with the first light of dawn, when the moon had already gone down. The girl was breast-feeding her child. Not a bird was singing. The stars, in their frozen swirls, had not even begun to grow faint. Her eyes were half closed and her arms were pink. The Frenchman watched her intently. The child’s hand was moving on his mother’s breast; eventually he fell asleep. She laid him on a folded blanket and stretched out on the bedroll again. She didn’t look up. But their eyes met for a moment. Faced with her impassive gaze, he felt cumbersomely expressive, almost like the horses.

  Reveille had been delayed for an hour, so they could go on sleeping or thinking. Feminine impassiveness, Duval reflected, is an effect of submission; a man, by contrast, is expressive because he never puts himself at another man’s disposal. What about the Indians? Perhaps he would have something to learn from them in that regard . . .

  The travelers had a day of rest, which they spent on the knolls by the river or in the water. They washed their clothes and the horses. At midday the grass was covered with white shirts drying, and the pink and gray coats of the horses shone, clean and bristling.

  Breakfast was so plentiful and long it almost flowed into lunch. The soldiers amused themselves fishing and searching for nests. The river water chilled the drinks. The men took a siesta with the women, slept soundly, and as they gradually woke up in the mid-afternoon, the lieutenant ordered them to set off, since he didn’t want to spend another night in such a dangerous place. He rode beside Duval, who questioned him about their destination with boyish curiosity. Lavalle was less cynical than usual. What was it like, the famed Pillahuinco, the river there in Pringles? Was it like the one they were leaving behind? The Frenchman had found it bucolic.

  The Argentine whistled briefly.

  “A paradise. This little valley is nothing, a moment. The other one is as big as a whole lifetime: a gigantic, everlasting Eden. But dangerous: the forest stretches for thousands of leagues, no one knows quite how far, and it’s teeming with savages, all sorts of wandering tribes, skilled in the use of deadly poisons. It’s only by a miracle that the fort has held out, on the very edge of the forest, so you can imagine what it would be like for a man on his own in there.”

  A thoughtful silence ensued. The Frenchman was wondering: “What’s the danger?”

  The next morning the woods were out of sight behind them and they were advancing across an empty prairie again. They were counting the days and the hours in fervent anticipation. Even the convicts seemed to perk up. The last days were sunny; it was almost summer. When the air was clear they could see flocks of birds in the distance descending toward the forest. The great torpor of the journey was disintegrating like a color seen from very close up. The Frenchman was thinking of the danger ahead, and of the frontier, which he imagined as a limit­less territory, where his route would allow for any interruption, granting him at every step a new and joyful entry — but he would have to learn how to move all over again, like a dancer, submitting to a strict discipline, so as not to stop for a single moment in that mysterious web. Sometimes, in the tides of thought that he allowed to rise within him, the forest appeared as a veil, imperfectly concealing other scenes, and the images of politics. Immoral politics scattered the landscape with living statues. He was intoxicated by the peculiar combination of nature and Machiavellianism.

  On the penultimate day, dense flocks of flamingos flew overhead with an oppressive baroque neutrality, and clouds of small gray birds rose from the ground, obscuring the way ahead. The convicts scanned the horizon curiously. Lavalle was drinking and in a bad mood. Duval was in his private space.

  His work as an engineer was like springtime’s transformation of the world. He shuddered with nameless, urgent needs, and a growing restlessness set his spine tingling. What was he supposed to do there at the edge of the world? For the moment, only Espina knew. But he cherished the hope that the task assigned to him would be all-encompassing and absorb his life entirely. He could not, in that state
of mind, have found satisfaction in anything less sublime.

  .

  She was woken by the silence that followed a trill from the tremulous beak of a nearby bird. It must have been late, to judge from the vertical strips of brightness at the edges of the paper curtains. But the child was fast asleep in the basket. Ema closed her eyes and turned over under the sheet without waking her husband. She gripped the edge of the blanket and gave it a quick shake: it puffed up into a soft dome, which then collapsed in slow motion, tepidly wedding their forms. Her husband was sleeping with his mouth open, breathing heavily, and Ema could feel his radiant warmth. She fell asleep but was woken again by the child crying, and this time she went to look at him: he was wriggling in the basket with his eyes still closed. She calmed him by stroking his forehead and murmuring a few words. Then she lifted her head and looked around.

  She slid aside the osier stick from which two sheets of paper — serving as a door — were hung, and went out onto the veranda of the hut. It was earlier than she had supposed: there was still an hour to go before the sun would rise and dispel the lingering cool, which seeped through the light fabric of her nightgown and made her shiver. She felt the baby stirring in her womb. It generally woke at that hour. She would give birth in four months’ time, at the end of the winter that had not yet begun.

  Between two erratic rows of huts, the street was empty. No one was up, not even the animals. A few windmills, with stationary sails. The faraway moon, almost transparent, the size of a head, already very low. Some thin clouds were drifting across the sky; she saw them suddenly turn pink, and just then the trilling that had woken her began again, glassy and prolonged: a goldfinch. With a ball of fat suspended from the eaves, she had attracted a white-banded mockingbird which sang for the family, sometimes all day long, but it was shy. Unlike the goldfinches, with their green and gray wings, which had befriended her and would come to eat seeds from her hand. Which of them was singing? She couldn’t see.

  She thought of going to get something for breakfast. Her husband would not wake up until it was time for him to return to the barracks; yesterday had been his day off duty, and he had spent it drinking and playing dice.

  As quietly as she had stepped out, she went back in and put on a dress that had been made by the Indian women, like all the clothing in the village. She put the basket on the table and contemplated the child, Francisco, who was sighing: finally he opened his eyes, looking very serious. Perhaps he wasn’t happy to have woken up. But when Ema picked him up and murmured something, he laughed sleepily. He was already ten months old. Slim and small, he appeared more fragile than he really was. His dark hair was very long and fine. Ema picked him up, unfolded the screens, placing them in front of the windows so that the light would not wake Gombo, and went out. Francisco rubbed his eyes violently.

  She set off walking unhurriedly along the empty street. Noises could be heard from the huts: a word, a baby crying for the breast. One of the many hares that the children of the village kept as pets came running toward Ema, stopped, and sat down to look at her. In a while, when the sun came up, they would turn and gaze at it intently, becoming easy prey for the horses, which ate them.

  A disheveled woman emerged from a hut, wearing a white dress she seemed to have slept in, it was so thoroughly crushed. She stopped on the threshold, bewildered and dazzled. Ema’s greeting startled her. When she saw who it was, she asked Ema to wait, ran inside, and came straight out again, holding a sleeping baby and a brush, with which she absently tidied her mop of hair. They set off together for the river, as the village around them was beginning to show the first signs of life. Reveille had not yet sounded from the fort but it would not be long. The soldiers were leaving the huts to report for duty, just in time, moving like sleepwalkers, burdened by their hangovers. They saw nothing, not even the day. It would take them a good part of the morning to recover. Some women, however, were returning from the fields by the river with buckets of milk.

  A sleepy soldier had come out onto the veranda of his house and stopped there, right on the edge, to pee, swaying dangerously.

  As the two women came over one of the hills on which the village had been built, the fort appeared before them, a sprawling edifice, with a breadth of roughly two hundred yards, its high bamboo palisades surmounted by towers at each of the four corners and the lookout, where a sentry was drowsing.

  The women turned their gaze toward the horizon beyond the river: the sky’s invisible spirals stretched away into the deep distance. Remote updrafts carried columns of birds up and up until they plunged from the top of that antigravitational fall, their far cries, some as small as pips, leaping about with a life of their own.

  The fields, as they did every morning, presented a colorful, variegated scene. To the right, along the edge of the forest, was the camp of the “tame” Indians under the protection of the fort. By that hour, they had been up and about for a long time. They were gathering to milk their little white cows and lighting fires, beside which, after bathing, they would spend the whole morning having breakfast and smoking. At dawn the water was warmer than the air, and from the moment the first light appeared in the east, they all went swimming for the pleasure of it. The grass was still shining with dew, and there they would lie down afterward and dry themselves in the waves of radiant heat from the fires, which the smoke from their cigarettes made visible. As Ema and her friend approached, a group of about thirty savages emerged from the river, shaking themselves and shouting joyfully. Beside a big fire on which water was being boiled for coffee and tea, they lit up their first cigarettes and took deep, voluptuous breaths of smoke.

  The women went their separate ways, Ema’s friend heading for a circle of Indians, while Ema went to the river to wash her baby. She sat on a rock with her feet in the water, beyond the place where the children played. The tepid, roundabout flow wet her skin. She cupped a few drops in her hand and washed Francisco’s face. He wriggled. It was quiet and calm; she let a daydream carry her away. Suddenly, right in front of them, almost between Ema’s feet, the head of an Indian emerged from the water; he had approached below the surface to surprise her. A face with asymmetrical features, a huge mouth, and the squinting eyes that were so common among the savages. The head ducked under again, then reappeared, with consummate agility, laughing all the while. A clown. Or could it have been a severed head, propelled by the diabolical force of laughter? But suddenly the Indian stretched out and floated, and the whole of his powerful body shone for a few seconds, surrounded by a nimbus of spreading ripples. Then he swam away.

  In the middle of the middle of the pool, the Indians were fishing with creels and sharpened sticks. Before dawn, the children went out searching for the coveted freshwater molluscs, which the birds could find only in full daylight, hours later. The banks must have been stripped clean that day, because the heron-ibis and the kingfishers could be heard complaining hoarsely from the trees. Perhaps they were hungry, and waiting for an opportunity to steal something.

  Ema looked around. The girls carried tiny combs, hanging from necklaces, against their napes, so that they could always ensure that their black hair was perfectly straight. She borrowed one from a girl who was passing and carefully combed Francisco’s hair. After which she went to one of the circles where breakfast was being cooked. Various Indians of both sexes, as well as two or three white women, were waiting as big fish, splayed and symmetrical like butterflies, roasted on spits. They offered her wild melons the size of apples and sour to the taste.

  She took a tiny egg from a raffia box, intrigued.

  “Are they partridge eggs?” she asked the Indian woman beside her.

  “No. Guinea fowl. Take as many as you like.”

  American guinea fowl are smaller than the African variety, almost like seagulls, and their thimble-size eggs are gray-green with a red spot on top. Ema broke two into a cup of milk that had been handed to her, stirred them in until the liquid t
ook on a yellowish color, and Francisco drank it conscientiously, down to the last drop. The Indian men were returning from the river with wet hair. Ema drank a cup of milk herself and rolled a cigarette, her first for the day. She inhaled deeply with her eyes closed, and waited before sending up a long shaft of smoke. The sun had already risen. It was shining on the plain across the river. Finally, all the birds began to sing, forgetting their wretchedness. Daytime happiness possessed them irresistibly. Even the conversations of the crows seemed cheerful. The fish were ready. They were sprinkled with salt and white vinegar. Ema ate half of one and drank a little cup of berry liqueur. The women rolled cigarettes and, with a characteristic movement, held them for the men to draw on. More people kept arriving, including soldiers who went swimming, or drank and smoked beside the fires. They had big bags under their eyes and were deathly pale: they must have been up all night gambling, and now they were coming for a snack before going to sleep or resuming duty.

  Suddenly two horsemen appeared, attracting everyone’s attention: two Indians, deputy chiefs, no doubt, riding small gray mares, chosen for the way their pale color contrasted with the riders, who were painted from head to foot. Without dismounting, they approached some bathers, with whom they conversed for a moment and laughed hoarsely. Everyone was pretending to ignore them.

  “Who are they?” Ema asked the Indian man sitting beside her, who, in a show of good manners, had not so much as glanced in their direction.

  “Two of Caful’s nephews; I don’t know what they’re called, but I bet their parents, who are always sucking up to the chief, have given them ridiculous names like Baúl or Raúl, or something like that,” he said, and burst out laughing.

  “Did they come from the fort?”