Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  Ema waited quietly for F. C. to begin the conversation. When the queen spoke, with a shy puzzlement, the mystique of society life shone through. Her guest trembled and smiled. They had hit it off. F. C.’s imperturbable frivolity clothed everything she said in a linguistic precision that was not of this world. For Ema, it was like hearing Latin. Listening to F. C., getting a sense of her life, she felt that she was understanding melancholy for the first time. The Indians had dissolved the queen’s childhood, falling upon her like the sky’s most beautiful display; to her, they had been ideas. And now, after thinking by proxy for so long, imagining what was going on in those splendidly plumed heads, behind those magnificently painted faces, she had realized that they were not artists but art itself, the culmination of melancholic mania. Melancholy had taught them to walk, and sent them on a long journey, all the way to the end of a path. And there, with supreme courage, they had looked frivolity in the face and breathed it deep into their lungs.

  .

  As time went by, Ema was gradually overtaken by an urgent desire whose futility exceeded all measures but the circumference of the universe itself: a desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see the system’s undulating veil, since in the world of the savages systems had the insubstantiality of the hummingbird’s song and the iridescence of its plumage, while their manifestations were immutable as archetypes. There had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind. She asked Evaristo Hugo if she was on the right track.

  The real, said the minister, was the State. And the supreme proof of that was the way it delegated its one inalienable function — the issuing of currency — to private individuals. Each citizen had a right to freedom, as long as that freedom was so complete as to exclude thinking.

  “There’s no point thinking,” he said, “unless others are making it happen. Money is all the telepathy we need.”

  In the most secluded of the quiet clearings where the Indians practised their shadowy financial art — projecting the shadow of the human onto the inhuman — Ema saw their dreamy haste, a rush of inventions that anchored them in the world.

  Everyone printed money; the means to do so were available to all. It had always been thus, they declared, since prehistoric times. But prehistory was another simulacrum. After all, the economy cemented the Indians’ only certitude: the impossibility of life. “Life is impossible,” was the clearest and most definitive formulation of the idea — the model — and they kept it in mind at all times. Throughout their lives. Whether they were procreating, watching a cloud go by, eating a wing of guinea fowl, swimming, or waiting for sleep to come . . . It was all they knew, all they had.

  They paid with the bills they printed. They were constantly paying; they didn’t mind or perhaps even notice. They were drawers, depicters, copyists, calligraphers; imagination gave them numbers, and the premonition of death. Melancholy, like an indifferent sphinx, proffered indeterminate figures, which grew voluminous in the sky. Life went on being impossible; the prehistoric aesthetic receded, like the Indians’ education. Children learned to use the printing plates before they learned to smoke; old people breathing their last would rest their heads on ink rollers. And yet it was an activity whose secret eluded them. “Money is too much,” they said, “and life is not enough.”

  Their secondary activities were genetics and pheasant-rearing. Ema was attracted to the world of the breeders, and soon began to see them, too, as shadows. As for the birds themselves, the luxurious pheasants that had seemed so solid and compact before, now she realized that they were shards scattered by a prodigious shattering of passion, and that their colors were signs of absent thoughts.

  Thanks to Evaristo Hugo, she obtained permission to visit the gardens of the great. For months she went on excursions to fantastic, feathery Bomarzos but she found them too elaborate; their rococo lacked authentic strangeness. She wanted to go and live on one of the big breeding farms, the last sanctuaries of unreal work, hidden in the depths of the forest, well beyond the ambit of her usual walks.

  Her husband, who noticed everything, understood the restlessness that had taken hold of Ema, and knew that her departure was inevitable. Without hesitation, in spite of the pain it caused him, he provided her with the warmest letters of recommendation for the breeders, and one day she set off, following a group that was returning to the imperial pheasant farm after having deposited its load of fattened birds on the sovereign’s tables. Leaving the court, which she had imagined as a perilous leap, turned out to be so easy it was barely noticeable. Everything simply vanished, and within a few weeks she found that she had settled into different but similar surroundings. At the farm, the distractions blended into one another so smoothly that they disappeared. It came as no surprise to her that work did not exist there either. That was the last and definitive lesson remaining for her to learn. Then everything fell into silence. There was no anabasis.

  Ema married one of the zoological engineers. Through the summer and the autumn she helped him with his daily tasks and went along to see the birds being released in the forest. It was a pleasant if uncertain time. She gave birth to her third child, another girl, so small and well formed that she looked like a doll.

  Time passed. The world was filling with a deep mood of melancholy. The sameness of the days and even the blue of the sky, which had filled her with dreams before, now drove her mind out beyond her own life, into indeterminate regions. She felt herself vacillating, that indigenous feeling.

  She told her husband that she had decided to return to the fort from which she had been captured years before. Together they examined the maps. She would have to travel more than two hundred leagues through the forest, but he thought it would be a smooth journey, imbued with all the slowness of the angels. He gave her two pheasants and two little gray horses, one with a double saddle for the older children. Ema would carry the baby on her back. And she left one morning, at dawn.

  .

  Pringles had not changed much. Neither the appearance of the village nor the routine of the fort had been substantially modified by the shipments of convicts sent to restore the population, diminished by raids and escapes, or by the arrival of new officers, fresh from the Academy and steeped in its syllabus, coming to fill the gaps left by promotions and disappearances. Espina was just the same, with his autocratic manner and his machinations, and so were the huts, which had been destroyed and built again a thousand times. There were still little herds of white ponies grazing on the hills; the children were as plentiful as ever; and the men persevered in distraction and vacancy.

  The only discernible novelty was that now any settler who made a request would be granted a parcel of land, in accordance with a policy adopted by the military command six months earlier. This measure had been authorized by the government for years, but Espina had chosen to delay its application until he had created economic conditions that would render work absolutely unthinkable. Some soldiers asked to take their retirement, claimed land on the river plains, and constructed flimsy, lightweight houses that were destroyed by the first rains. Cut off from daily interactions, they had given free rein to their nameless desires for calm and immobility.

  Ema lived on her own for a start, with the three little ones and two Indian women, in an abandoned hut on the edge of town. Then she accepted the invitation of an officer to join his harem in a mansion that he had built on the banks of the Pillahuinco. Some months of rest and reflection followed. Her experiences in Indian territory made her mysterious to the men, who failed to connect this dark queen with the hesitant girl of three years before. Her imagination had matured along with her body. She took lovers again, but sentimental adventures could no longer occupy her entirely.

  For some time she had been in thrall to an idea, pursuing its developments in every aspect of the landscape. Each thing she encountered became a part of this new system of thought. She
wanted to establish a pheasant-breeding farm in Pringles, a farm that could supply the dining tables of the entire white population in the east, all the way to Buenos Aires. This meant thinking gigantically, well beyond what she could do on her own, because only a large-scale farm, like those she had visited during her captivity, would be viable. An extensive area of forest and fields would have to be transformed, which meant several years of work, founding a settlement, reorganizing daily life, occupying an ecosystem.

  For a long time she devoted herself exclusively to visiting a wide range of Indian villages, never missing a chance to study the business opportunities or discuss them with the chiefs. She bought a few pheasants here and there, and eggs, and had some portable incubators built. Eventually she felt that the moment had come to act. She needed land — there was a site she had in mind — and a loan so that she could buy breeding stock of every variety. Through the officer with whom she was living, she requested an appointment with Espina.

  The following day, in a meeting of slightly less than an hour, everything was settled. Twenty thousand hectares of forest and fields were granted to the young woman, along with a suitably generous loan. The sight of her entranced the commander: slim and elfin, with her oiled black hair, her Indian eyes fixed on the ground, and her beautiful dark hands. Her idea, proposed in a neutral tone, struck him as crazy. But he was aware that she had lived in the court of Catriel, and assumed that she had good contacts. If so, any business venture that she embarked upon, however disastrous, would serve his interests by widening the circulation of the money he was printing. So far, his success in that regard had been limited, and he didn’t want to waste any opportunity to reach the great courts with his bills. Since Ema wanted to buy breeding stock, she would be dealing with the breeders, the savage nation’s wealthiest and most mobile set.

  The conditions of the loan could not have been more generous: half a percent interest every five years, the whole sum to be repaid within four centuries.

  “By then,” Espina said, laughing heartily, as if he had cracked a brilliant joke, “neither of us will be alive!”

  As soon as the young woman left, he set to work designing the bills that he would have printed for her, and calculated how long it would take for the presses to turn out that much money. They had agreed that the sum would be delivered progressively, as it was printed.

  With the first installment, which she received two days later, she bought horses from the only dealer in town, a mestizo with devilish features, who lived in a shed with all his animals. He greeted her with a honey-dripping smile, and when he found out that she intended to buy two dozen horses, his eyes twinkled with greed. Right away, he began to spout ribald recommendations intended to confuse her, which Ema had to make an effort to block out. It was a long and irksome task. She preferred the smaller animals, typical Indian horses with little heads and big round haunches. Some were so shiny and compact they looked like bronze figures. Some of his horses were too fat, like barrels with thick legs that ended in snow-white hooves. Noticing her preference, the dealer promptly upped the prices of the animals concerned.

  Next Ema bought a number of carts made of wood, bone and rattan, painted in loud colors, and ox teams to pull them.

  Finally, she decided to select at least a part of the staff who would be working under her orders. White people were out of the question, so she would search among the Indians. Many of the young people would appreciate the change. Early one morning she went to the beach where they had breakfast, accompanied by one of the girls who looked after her children.

  As soon as Ema arrived, the Indians said to her: “There’s Bob Ignaze.”

  The dawn light was still uncertain. She looked at the figures emerging from the water and recognized Ignaze, a famous dandy, an adolescent Tarzan. She hadn’t thought of him, but there was nothing to be lost by offering him the job. Ema approached the circle in which he was standing and waited for him to finish off a pail of milk. He lived almost exclusively on milk and the blood of birds. She took him aside and explained what it was about.

  “Why me?” asked Bob.

  Ema shrugged her shoulders.

  “Why not?”

  Thoughtfully, the young man half closed his eyes.

  “Pheasants?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t understood.

  She explained briefly where the farm would be and gave him a rough summary of her ideas about how to manage such an operation. They were sitting on the grass, smoking.

  “Delighted to accept. I was waiting for something like this.”

  He leaped to his feet and grabbed the arm of a young man who had just come out of the water, dripping wet.

  “This is my cousin Iván,” he said to Ema. “Will you come with us?”

  “Of course,” said Iván in a sleepy voice. He seemed to think that he was being invited to go for a walk.

  There was more light now, and Ema could see them clearly. Both had their faces painted black down to the base of the nose. That was what gave them an animal appearance. In the midst of that thick black paint, under eyelids heavy as moss, their small, squinting eyes shone cruel and birdlike.

  “Who else?” said Bob, looking around.

  He pointed to a circle of Indian men and women.

  “They’re all trustworthy.”

  He went over to speak with them. A moment later he brought back a man with painted arms, who thanked Ema for having thought of him and his comrades. His only condition was that they should be allowed to bring their girlfriends. Ema did not object to that. She spent the rest of the morning speaking with about twenty young Indian men. Some had not yet received a genital covering. They were accompanied by their fiancées or girlfriends, many of whom had babies or were pregnant. The first group of rearers would number about fifty, by Ema’s estimate.

  The rendezvous was arranged for the end of that afternoon, on the road leading west, at the edge of the village. Ema told the Indians to go to the horse dealer’s shed to collect the animals. Since Bob had nothing to do, he went with her to the store to buy building materials. Throughout the proceedings he displayed indifference and disdain. Operating autonomously, the Indians couldn’t understand why anyone would buy things in a store, when nature provided everything for free. This struck Ema as a moral question and she was sure that one day someone would point to this difference in order to vaunt the superiority of white people over Indians. Whites agreed to pay for everything, and that created a background in which things were free of charge, which is what made Indians Indians.

  Ema left the loaded carts and went to her lodgings. Since she had time, she washed the children, combed their hair, put their things into a bag and said goodbye to the officer and his wives, inviting them to visit her some time.

  “If it doesn’t work out with the birds,” said her husband, “come back to us.”

  “Goodbye.”

  The sun was setting as she left the village on her little gray horse, riding sidesaddle, followed by the carts. In one of them were the children and the Indian girls who looked after them; in another, the twenty-five pheasant cages and the metal boxes full of eggs. The pheasants, caged since the day before, were nervous. They screamed for no reason and some were even tearing out their feathers in a fury. None had touched their food, but they had drunk all their water. Ema had the upturned bottles in the cages refilled, and took the opportunity to add a few drops of a powerful tranquilizer to each one. Within a few minutes the pheasants were sleeping, or sitting down looking dazed.

  The workers were waiting at the appointed place, with women and a considerable number of children (most of the parents were barely out of childhood themselves). They formed a ring around the pheasants, gazing at them in rapture. Painted for the occasion, they formed an impressive group. Bob stepped forward, unrecognizable under the black paint covering him from head to foot. On his shoulders, drippings in various tones of gray. His hair, s
hiny with oil, was tied up on top of his head.

  “Let’s go,” said Ema. “There’s no time to lose.”

  “Is your property very far away?”

  She pointed to a place well within the forest, where the dreamy rays of the sun were lighting up the canopy.

  “A few leagues. But at the rate the carts go, it will take us all night.”

  They climbed on board, settled the children on the bundles, and began the journey. Though short, it felt momentous, because they were going to settle in the new place. They weren’t taking many things — they didn’t have much to take. More than one of them, perhaps, was thinking that this pheasant-farming venture wouldn’t last.

  Before it got dark, the moon appeared, accompanied by the gloomy song of a horned owl. Then the stars, so big it seemed you could reach out and take hold of them. The children had fallen asleep; the adults followed suit. The women riding on the haunches of the horses rested their cheeks on the painted backs of their men and closed their eyes, breathing the mysterious scent of the uruku bush. Those who remained awake lit cigarettes and smoked them absently. Sometimes one horse would approach another, and a bottle would be passed from hand to hand. The night was warm, without the slightest breeze; insects and a few birds sang, sounding incurably languid.

  They were traveling along the outer edge of the forest, sometimes close to a tributary stream, sometimes among islands of trees, from which, as the caravan went by, clouds of bats would rise and obscure the moon.

  Suddenly, signs transformed by the darkness sprang up like rabbits before Ema’s eyes, and she realized that she had reached the boundary of her land. She told Bob, who was nodding along beside her, and they worked out the time. Judging by the position of the stars, it could not have been much after midnight.

  “At night, you travel more quickly,” said Bob.

  They entered the forest, heading for the river, and when they came to the bank, Ema said, “We can sleep for a few hours, until dawn. We’ll choose the place for our settlement in the daylight.”