Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  “They must have been gambling all night, and now they’re going back to their uncle’s camp to sleep.”

  Caful’s settlement lay some leagues away. The accord between the neighboring groups was strange and complex, and the cunning chief contrived to complicate it further day by day. Who could tell what crafty diplomatic gambit had determined the visit of the two princes? They were truly splendid, thought Ema: small and handsome, with their bodies vanishing under the paint and their long, black, oiled hair. Modern rifles hung from their saddles.

  A good while later, she set off back to the village, alone. She had left the baby with some Indian girls, who liked to play at captives all day long. She was carrying her provisions in a bag: eggs, mushrooms, milk, and a tin of tea.

  The hut was as she had left it, with the curtains drawn close and the screens extended. She went in quietly. Gombo was sleeping; she did not wake him. But his sleep was lighter now, nearing its end, so she set about getting something ready for his late breakfast. She made flatbread with mushrooms and chili, splayed the fish and doused them with brandy to prepare them for frying. When it was all ready she went and sat down beside the sleeping man’s head. He was stirring and about to wake. Gombo was a gaucho, about thirty-five years old, with very deep wrinkles for his age, long hair, and a full pepper-and-salt beard. He was dreaming of something.

  Taking her time, Ema prepared a large cigar, with a leaf that she rolled and unrolled several times, and a mixture of herbs that she took from a small box. Holding it between her lips, she lit it and puffed a couple of times, surrounding herself and the sleeping man with a little cloud. The smell finally woke him; he opened his eyes and looked at her blankly. Ema took his head in one hand and lifted it slightly, then rested it on her thigh. She put the cigar in his mouth, and took it out a moment later, without waiting for him to inhale, repeating this operation over and over, until he gradually came back to life, adjusting the rhythm of his breathing to the smouldering of that thick roll of herbs. Eventually the clouds of dense, pungent smoke, as big as atmospheric clouds, found their way into his lungs and infiltrated the blood heading for his brain.

  The state of his eyes spoke eloquently of the previous night’s intemperance.

  “Are you awake?” she asked.

  He uttered an incomprehensible word and coughed. She raised a cup of milk to his lips and held it there while he drank. He had no appetite, and would probably not eat anything during his days on duty at the barracks. The soldiers ran on cigarettes and alcohol, in general. Propped against his wife’s belly, Gombo was startled by a sudden watery movement.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “There’s time,” she replied, and went to put the fish on the fire.

  He asked after the baby. Sitting on the rush mat in his underpants, he brushed his hair and beard, stretching incessantly. Ema asked about Caful’s two nephews, who had intrigued her.

  “Where did you see them?”

  “By the river, just then. They came from the fort on two little gray mares, and people said they were going back to their uncle’s camp.”

  Gombo sighed: “They come to gamble, loaded with gold and agate. They must have lost everything, otherwise they would have bought horses.”

  For a moment he remained pensive.

  “Although they might have other reasons. They say Caful is negotiating a new peace agreement with Espina. There have been a lot of visits in the last few weeks.”

  “But isn’t there peace already?”

  “I guess Espina wants a more complicated, more delicate kind of peace.”

  He got up and opened the windows. The sky was white and overcast, and the increasing sultriness of the air indicated that a storm was on the way. He went out onto the veranda and whistled at the birds. There he unfolded a table and two chairs.

  Ema brought a basket of bread, the fish, scrambled eggs, a bottle of white wine, and a bowl of washed fruit. They ate at leisure, chatting.

  When he had gone, she went back inside and washed up in a few minutes, folded the rush mats on which they slept, and put them away in a chest.

  Then, with nothing to do — it was too hot inside for a siesta — she went out into the hut’s tiny sunken garden, where she had planted some cuttings and bulbs. The anemones were the last flowers of summer, but they were not yet open. She regretted not having watered them earlier. If she did it now the sun would burn them. But the earth was parched, and the dead shells of bugs bore witness to the drought.

  A yellowy-gray cat with a black face came slinking up. He looked at her and meowed. Finding him one day in the forest, she had been surprised to see such a delicate animal roaming free and starved half to death; he must have been the pet of some Indian concubine. The birds hated him, not without reason; he was a hunter, but didn’t eat his victims, living instead on the pieces of cooked meat that Ema sometimes remembered to give him.

  Hours later, she went to the river to fetch Francisco. She found the girls under a neem tree; they had given the baby milk and berries, and offered to look after him until nightfall. Ema walked away along the bank, her prominent belly swaying, in search of a cool place where she could wait for sunset. The arm of the river bent around, and there was a little stone bridge, in the shade of which echidnas were playing. She watched them for a moment, charmed by the uncoordinated movements of those spiny little creatures. When she made up her mind to go on, she took a path that led into a dense grove. The trees were quiet; the birds must have been napping. The air was conducive to sleep.

  A little further on she came to a beach, where she found ten young people swimming and sleeping. Since she often went wandering along the edges of the forest, they knew her. She sat down on the grass, next to an Indian girl who was also pregnant, and they chatted for a while. At that spot, just a few threads of sunlight filtered by the greenery penetrated the shade. Ema lay back and almost closed her eyes; through the little slits left open she could see points of green light moving high above, a luminous, golden green, with mossy shadows and sometimes a gentle, fantastic explosion of the summer sky’s polished blue, or a streak of colorless light.

  In the distance she could hear the voices of the youths, who were playing dice. Delicate little ducks were splashing about on the surface of the river. The rustling in the domes of foliage lulled her to sleep.

  When she woke up, the light was fading. Some of the Indians had gone back into the water, others were drowsing on the grass, and they were all smoking. Ema smoked a cigarette too and then took her leave. She made her way back as slowly as possible. When she came down from the hill, she saw the vast colors of the sky over the plains. The rusty red hue of the clouds that were rising in the east could not disguise their threatening burden: it would rain that night. Among the pinks and violets, she saw Venus appear in the west, shining brightly, surrounded by gray haloes. It was already night as she walked down the village’s single street toward her hut.

  The girls were waiting for her on the veranda holding Francisco, who was sound asleep. She was pleased to see them. It would have been annoying to have to search them out, weary as she was. She invited them in to drink what was left of the milk. They helped her to draw the curtains, and lit the lamp without being asked. She said they could stay the night, since she was on her own. Then they showed her what they had brought in a bag: fat, transparent river snails in their twisted shells. They put them on to boil with herbs, and very soon the hut was full of a delicious smell. They sat down around the table with big white china plates in front them, thick and heavy as stone.

  After dining and putting the baby to bed, Ema and the girls went out onto the veranda to get some fresh air before turning in. The moon was rising, veiled by peculiar storm clouds. A threatening wind began to blow, and they felt flurries of birds passing over the huts. Lightning flashed, and a moment later the first drops of rain fell with the force of bullets, making the girls
rush inside. But Ema stayed a moment longer on her own.

  She was thinking of the night of the Monkey Festival, the first time she had left the fort, and the fear she had felt on that occasion, faced with the limitless chaos of life. But even then, and perhaps for a long time before that, Ema had known that her life was destined to unfold in the midst of strangeness simply because of the century into which she had been born. Barely out of childhood and alone in the world with her baby, she found herself banished to a dangerous and ill-defined frontier. The epoch demanded absolute calm; humans had to become as impassive as animals.

  The flashes of lightning entertained her; they were so unpredictable. All that she remembered vanished in an instant. The light revealed nothing but its own futility.

  On arriving in Pringles after the exhausting journey through the desert, Ema and another very young convict woman had been taken aside and handed over to two officers. The one she ended up with was a lieutenant whose surname was Paz: a carefree young man, perpetually drunk, with the health of a hardy animal and imperturbable in sleep. When he received Ema, he dismissed the wife he already had. His lodgings, like those of all the other officers, were above the casino. The doors opened onto a corridor that led to the main salon. Paz had the use of two large, carpeted rooms, full of old, dark objects, including a mahogany tub in which he took two long baths each day.

  For Ema, it was a life of confinement, since she only left the apartment to gather with the other women in the corridors or neighboring rooms. They never went down into the street. From the windows she could see only the inside of the palisade and the sky above. In any case, they lived by night and slept all day with the curtains drawn. She found that life poetic and pleasurable. She loved the subtle luminosity of the oil lamps filtered by shades and screens. It was a welcome change from the journey, after that excessive glare and exposure to the elements.

  The lieutenant informed her, however, that it was a provisional arrangement, since he was expecting the arrival, any day, of a European mistress, who would be coming by coach from Buenos Aires. The idea seemed preposterous but it was true. A number of the officers already had such companions, and Ema wondered what exorbitant sums must have been offered to persuade these courtesans to renounce the world and come to the frontier. They never showed themselves, and all the news of them was gleaned from their maids.

  The officers organized their time in a defiantly unnatural manner. They burned sandalwood and slept drunkenly on the damasked sofas; gambling was their sole occupation for months on end, either among themselves or with the chiefs who came to visit for that purpose. Softened by the gambling, they needed endless hours of sleep.

  That was where she saw the Indians for the first time — Indians of a particular kind, since only the grandest chiefs came into the fort, always with exorbitant pomp.

  One night, not long after her arrival, one of the other women came to find her and said that two wealthy princes had arrived and were gambling with the officers in the salon. Ema asked if it would be possible to see them.

  “Yes. But don’t make any noise. They don’t like to be distracted.”

  They went out onto the balcony holding hands, and approached the rail on tiptoe; it was barely visible against the feeble illumination from below, where a single porcelain lamp was alight at one corner of the rug on which the men were playing.

  The furniture had been pushed back against the wall. It was hard for Ema to make out the scene, because of the darkness and the positions of the players, but also because of the perspective: she was looking down almost vertically.

  Among the faint gleams that streaked the darkness, she could see two indigenous gentlemen, painted from head to toe, their heads shaved at the front with very long, oiled hair growing at the back. Behind them, also sitting on the floor, were other Indians, who were merely observing, their cigarettes held by beautiful kamuros, who were painted too but with black ink, which made their small, graceful bodies disappear into the shadows. And the officers, all in their ornate dress uniforms with gilded buttons, wreathed in tobacco smoke. The crisp and multiple clicking of the dice on the boards was the only sound; it seemed to hang in the silence.

  It was a magnificent sight, and Ema would never forget it.

  Later, in the course of the month and a half that she remained there, she witnessed many such gatherings, and even attended some, keeping a certain distance. She observed the indecisive movements of the Indian women, and let their passionate spirit flow into her. On gambling nights they lit only one lamp, with the weakest flame; that dimness recreated the conditions of the forest at night. The limbs of the Indians seemed red, like fiery copper, and the charms tattooed on the women’s skin became nets in which the darkness quivered.

  They drank continually. The fort provided the finest liqueurs, which were served out by the women. Sometimes, after many hours of gambling, they realized that, since the beginning, they had been hearing a continuous flowing sound, as if they had been on the banks of a river, but it was just the sound of the cups being filled.

  It was most unusual for the officers to turn in before dawn, and they would often stay at the gaming rug for days and nights on end. That too was something Ema enjoyed. She liked to see the morning light filtering in through the closed shutters, while the gambling continued inside, and the men pursued their nocturnal occupations with a drunken stubbornness, in spite of all the evidence, and the bugle sounded for the day’s first change of guard, muffled by heavy upholstered doors and double or triple walls, summoning some officer, who would pick up his bundles of cash without a word and stagger away.

  The spring nights tended to be rainy. Ema had never seen such storms. Lightning flashes filled the sky, and thunderclaps came one after another, or simultaneously, for hours on end. If the women were alone, as usual, they would go out onto one of the covered balconies on the second floor and watch the storm in silence, smoking . . . The agitation of the elements contrasted ideally with the players inside who barely moved all night. Sometimes, before the women decided to return to their rooms, an unidentifiable shadow (an officer who had run out of credit, perhaps, or a ghost), would join them at the back of the balcony, beyond the reach of the lightning’s glow, and disappear again without introducing himself.

  Finally, Paz’s European mistress arrived, with two carts full of luggage and three maids. As soon as he received the news that she had reached Azul, Paz went to the village to arrange Ema’s accommodation. He found a soldier who wanted a wife, a certain Gombo (obviously a false name, but almost all the men had a past that they were anxious to leave behind). The girl gathered up her few belongings, received the officer’s gift of a Cossack pony and left with Francisco. When the gaucho set eyes on her, he seemed to be disappointed: too girlish, too immature. When it came to women, the troops did not share the officers’ artificial tastes; their desires were coarser.

  But he kept his word, and even evicted his two Indian concubines so that she would feel more at ease.

  Gombo was a conscript, like the rest of them. He had been on the frontier for more than ten years, enduring all the vicissitudes of melancholy. Affable by nature, kindhearted, and almost excessively polite. Besides gambling, he loved fishing. Although he was not yet forty, his drawn, ascetic face was deeply wrinkled, and his hair was going gray. A while back, he had been promoted to corporal and then demoted for some reason. None of which mattered to him in the least.

  They didn’t spend much time together. When he wasn’t on sentry duty at the fort, Gombo went fishing for days and nights on end in far-off places, or got together with his friends to gamble. So Ema had long days of solitude in which to grow accustomed to her new life.

  The hut faced onto the single curving street of the embryonic village. The dwellings, all about thirty yards apart, were small and fragile, raised on piles, with square wooden verandas. There was nothing serious about them: they were frivolous, toys made of ba
rk and paper. In the case of an attack, everyone would have to take refuge in the fort, and leave their little houses at the mercy of the savages. The street ran around the base of a hill, which provided some protection from the south winds. Plants grew quickly there, so quickly that some huts were already disappearing into the foliage.

  The white population of Pringles was made up entirely of the soldiers and their women. Real colonization would not begin for many years to come. Peace with the Indians was extremely difficult and fragile in Azul; three hundred miles further out, in Pringles, it was not even on the agenda.

  This was the first time Ema was able to observe the Indians in less formal circumstances. And since she had nothing else to do, her knowledge of their civilization grew considerably. On the other side of the hill, along a tributary of the Pillahuinco river, there was a large settlement of so-called tame Indians, who lived under the protection of the fort, though no one really understood the basis of the relationship. Their feather-light tents, of scant practical use, stood here and there on the steepest parts of the bank. They drank and gambled with the soldiers, or went fishing and hunting, or simply looked for pleasant spots to spend the afternoon. The soldiers were always invited to their tribal ceremonies.

  As luck would have it, the first night that Ema spent outside the fort was the night of the Monkey Festival. Carrying her sleeping child, she set off with Gombo to find a place on the beach. All the village women were there, and the soldiers, and various officers, who had come out of curiosity.

  There was no moon. People were scattered about at random on the grass. The only light came from fires in which aromatic substances were burning. The figures seemed to be barely sketched in, distinguished from the shadows only by their movements. While waiting, the people drank and smoked. All the Indians were painted. The children ran around everywhere, playing; no one tried to stop them.

  In a large wicker cage hanging from a low branch was a little female monkey. Ema didn’t see her until much later on, because she was beyond the firelight’s range. The animal seemed to be asleep. A child, in the course of his running about, thrust the cage aside; then a man got up and stopped it swinging.