by Cesar Aira
“Are you surprised to see me here?”
“Why should I be surprised?”
“We’re camped a league away, over there. I came out to exercise some colts.”
There were all pure breds. The chief pointed to a white one, ridden by a boy with a squint and a fringe.
“That one drank sea water; he’ll go crazy.”
He burst out laughing. The youths were looking scornfully at Ema’s fat little horses.
The chief invited her to come to his camp straight away, for a drink. He asked where Ema and her friends were staying. When he heard that they were in the caves of New Rome, he didn’t say a word. Not for anything in the world would he have set foot in there.
The camp, which they reached after half an hour’s journey at walking pace, consisted of nothing more than a few paper tents covered with snow, and about fifty men and women, all related to the chief. It was very close to the coast; more than once, the campers said, the tide had woken them at night. In the hours before dawn, they added, the seawater was milky and warm. They kept themselves covered with a thick, transparent fat, which they stored in a barrel. Each visitors was given a jarful. It was whale fat, so they were told.
They drank without respite. They played with feather dice and looked at illustrations. A compact gathering, full of secrets and sadism. The chief was hoarse. The talk was licentious. They asked about Ema’s children and the breeding farm. She invited the chief to come and see it.
“Maybe one day I’ll go,” said the chief, “if I’m still alive, that is. Maybe one of these nights the tide will rise, and I will never wake again.”
He was drunk. By the time Ema’s party left, it was night. Just as they got back, a storm broke, and it lasted several days. They hunted armadillos and echidnas in the caves. They spent long hours asleep, and painted themselves with great care. They sat down to smoke in the room overlooking the bay, watching the waves whipped up by the storm, and thought or slept.
21 october 1978
Author’s note
Gentle reader: unless you are from Pringles and belong to the Committee of the Signifier, as I for one am and do, it may not be obvious that back-cover copy never covered anyone’s back.* But for some reason I find myself under the whimsical obligation to tell you how this historiola occurred to me. The setting is propitious to the sharing of confidences: a lovely spring morning in the Flores Pumper Nic, where I often come to think. Tomasito (aged two) is playing among the tables, which are crowded with kids cutting school. Leisure reigns; there is time to spare.
Some years ago I was very poor, and thanks to the good offices of a publisher friend, I was able to earn enough to pay my analyst and go on vacation by translating long novels of the variety known as “gothic”: odysseys in which the female protagonists — sometimes English, sometimes Californian — transported the same old entanglements over hymenoptical oceans, oceans of passionate tea. Naturally, I enjoyed those books, but over time I came to feel that there were too many passions, canceling each out like air freshener. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than I came up with the eminently sportive idea of writing a “simplified” gothic novel. Down to work. In the realm of the imagination, my decisions are swift. I resorted to the Eternal Return. I renounced Being, became Sei Shonagon, Scheherezade, plus the animals. The “anecdotes of destiny.” For several weeks, I amused myself. I sweated a little. I laughed. And in the end it turned out that Ema, my miniature self, had created a new passion for me, the passion for which all others can be exchanged, as money is exchanged for all things: indifference. What more could I ask?
césar aira
* * *
* This note originally appeared on the back cover of the Mondadori edition of Ema, la cautiva.
Copyright © 1981 by César Aira
Translation copyright © 2016 by Chris Andrews
Originally published by Mondadori as Ema, la cautiva in 1997; published in conjunction with the Michael Gaeb Literary Agency/Berlin
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1364) in 2016
New Directions books are published on acid-free paper
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aira, César, 1949– author. | Andrews, Chris, 1962– translator.
Title: Ema, the captive / César Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.
Other titles: Ema, la cautiva. English
Description: First American paperback edition. | New York : New Directions Publishing, 2016.
Identifiers: lccn 2016009507 | isbn 9780811219105 (alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Single women—Argentina—Fiction. | Women prisoners—Fiction.
| Argentina—Social conditions—19th century—Fiction. | gsafd: Historical fiction
Classification: LCC PQ7798.1.I7 E4313 2016 | ddc 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009507
eISBN 9780811226035
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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