by Cesar Aira
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Carlos in a stage whisper.
“Do you think that’s wise?”
Riders were still coming and going inside and beyond the razed village. A number of terrified cows had strayed into the camp. There were loose horses everywhere, some of them lying prostrate, but where could theirs be? Clarke was prepared to mount any of them, provided they made their escape. He cocked his gun and led the way to where they had slept. Fortunately, they did not stumble onto any lingering combat. When they were halfway to the river, Gauna appeared, leading two horses that were as unknown to them as the one he was riding.
“Mount up,” he said.
“Did you find Repetido?” was the Englishman’s first question.
“Don’t worry, he was the only one I looked for.”
And indeed there he was, with a faint phosphorescent glow to him, his flanks trembling . . . together with ten other ponies at least as good as the ones they had lost. They were already loaded with their things, hurriedly girthed, but ready to leave nonetheless. Gauna had wasted no time, once he had spied the chance to get his own way and make off after the Widow. Clarke did not have the heart to reproach him for it. The best thing for all of them was to get away. He would make an exception, and leave without saying goodbye. They rounded up their troop without dismounting, and within a few seconds were fleeing across open country. When they looked back, the encampment was a mass of glowing smoke, crisscrossed by bullets, spears, and speeches. They said nothing, although they could all have admitted: “this time we escaped by the skin of our teeth”; but it was difficult to speak at full gallop. They soon lost sight of the scene of battle. A welcome silence greeted them. For two hours, they traveled through the night, lit only by a pale moon. Even as they fled, Clarke still felt time had no meaning, because he had witnessed a drama of simultaneity that seeped in everywhere. Might they not be fleeing before the massacre had started? If that were so, they would soon find themselves in the thick of it, killing and dying — though not necessarily in that order. However, the ride cleared the cobwebs from his mind. They changed once to fresh horses (Clarke leapt on to Repetido’s familiar back) so that they could continue for another couple of hours.
The moon traced a wide arc in the sky before disappearing behind increasingly dense mists. Above and below gradually became indistinguishable in the fog. It was only when they came to a halt that they realized how invisible everything had become. To go on would be suicide, because sooner or later one of the horses would fall into a gopher hole. And above all, they ran the risk of getting lost and heading back the way they had come. That was what decided them. They carried on a short while, more from inertia than anything else, and were surprised to find that they were on the bottom slopes of a range of hills. Some natural walls forced them to change direction, and there and then, they dismounted. They were so exhausted they scarcely had the strength to lay out their gear and wrap themselves in their ponchos. It was so damp, thought Clarke, that all his bones would he aching the next day. But there was no point in lighting a fire; because it was not cold. Nor had they eaten. So what? A leaden sleep forced his eyes shut.
8: The Underground
When they awoke, the sun must have been high, even though it was still invisible behind the fog, and cast little more than a diffuse white glow in the center of a bluish-gray expanse remarkable above all for its immobility. An immobile world was one without light, even in full daytime. Clarke was awakened by Gauna repeatedly shaking his arm: and although he always prided himself on being instantly alert, this time he was sunk so deep in a mindless stupor, that he had no idea who he was, or what he was doing there. This was explained in part by what had recently happened to him, but also by what was happening to him now. They were surrounded by a number of upright figures, who loomed through the mist. There weren’t very many of them, although it took Clarke some time to realize this. He looked at Gauna, who as usual merely shrugged his shoulders. Clarke had sat on his saddle without being aware of it, and now searched for his boots. While he was pulling them on, his mind began to function. First of all in the past, reviewing the dreadful events of the previous night, then in the present. Naturally enough, he surmised that the present was a consequence of the immediate past, and that the strangers were, like them, fugitives from the disaster at Coliqueo’s camp. But he only had to draw closer to them to see this was not the case: there had been a kind of break in the night, and these were new people, the product of new circumstances, who were coming to greet him. Objectively, this was a relief. They were four pale little men, Indian-looking but smaller and whiter, who wore no paint or grease. They were dressed in bright colors, and seemed in fact a little overdressed for the season, wearing caps as well. Clarke bade them good-day, and they replied, without much of a smile but without being too curt either. He asked who they were, and it was only when they replied that he realized they did not speak the same language. He was momentarily perplexed. The Indian who spoke did so for perhaps three-quarters of a minute; as Clarke had not grasped his opening words, he lost all the rest as well. He turned for help toward Gauna, who was a good linguist. There he met another surprise. The gaucho had gone as white as a sheet, his eyes had turned up and a wheezing moan came from his gaping mouth. He was suffering an asthma attack, which must have been hours coming on, although in that case Clarke was surprised he had not lit a fire to burn his medicinal powders. He offered to do so for him now, but Gauna shook his head firmly and gestured as if to say: “carry on, carry on,” so Clarke turned back to face the Indians.
“Do you speak Voroga?” he asked.
“Of course. We are Vorogas,” the man who had spoken earlier replied. Clarke understood him perfectly. He suddenly realized he had understood before as well. They had said: “Good day to you, we trust we have not interrupted your sleep, but it was hard for us to contain our curiosity, because visitors here are so rare.” Why then had he imagined he had not understood? The logical explanation was to blame the difficulty he had felt waking up, but on reflection an illogical explanation was probably closer to the mark.
The ten languages in the Mapuche family, which Clarke had begun to study a decade and a half earlier, were distinguished from the other languages of the world by one essential feature: they were languages that were exquisitely deferential to foreigners, and not because their speakers chose to be, but because of their very structure, at least in their spoken form. When someone learns a foreign language, he inevitably commits all kinds of mistakes, even after lengthy study and frequent practice. Native speakers also make mistakes, except that they are not so much errors as the natural deformations that a prolonged automatic use of a language imperceptibly produces in such a delicate structure. Both kinds of distortion occurred in Mapuche, with the result that no one who began to speak one of their languages sounded like a beginner. Whether anyone else understood was another matter.
That other matter was also an interesting curiosity. Mistakes, bad habits, the stylizations of speech, all immediately appeared as a manifestation of art. Art may be understood in many different ways according to different cultures and ages, but these definitions all have one thing in common: art, the thing that is art, is that which does not demand understanding, since it is pure action whose meaning is a question of subjective choices. Formalities, intrinsic translations, were at the very heart of all the Mapuche languages. For this reason they had an old proverb which contained the key to all their behavior: “Do no more than talk.” Crossing their eyes, staring at the ground, were only a minor part of their meaning. The rest came from their words.
This then was all that Clarke’s misunderstanding amounted to: an instant. Fleeting as are all instants, even when placed end to end as it were, it passed, and he was now in animated conversation with the group of Indians.
“Do you live nearby?”
“Just down here.”
“Which leader do you follow?”
“Pillán is the name of our prese
nt monarch. If you are not in such a hurry as to make a short halt impossible, we should like to introduce you to him. We receive so few visits!”
“Pillán? I have not heard the name.”
“I’m not surprised. He’s only very recently taken up the position.”
“Ah, yes? Did he succeed to it?”
“After a certain fashion. In reality, I am sorry to tell you that we have suffered a power struggle, a civil war one might say — if that were not too grand a term for our tiny, submerged society.”
“My condolences. A civil war is still a civil war, even if it takes place within a single family.”
“By an extension of its very meaning!”
“If you like.”
A silence.
“Well . . . would you do us the honor?”
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no problem.” At this point, Clarke thought it desirable to introduce a note of democracy. “Wait until my friend here can speak, and I’ll ask his opinion.”
Gauna was still gasping for breath. The Indian who had been doing the talking made a suggestion which combined the most delicate courtesy with the most calculated sadism.
“Ask him now, so he can be considering his answer. After all, he can hear.”
These words struck home. Gauna rolled up his blanket and slung it on his horse’s back.
“To judge by his attitude,” Clarke said, lowering his voice, “I would guess that he agrees. Where are your horses?”
“Nowhere.”
“Pardon?”
“We don’t use horses.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s nothing to be so surprised at. We don’t need them, you see.”
“I don’t understand how you can do without such a useful animal if you live on the plains.”
“That’s just it: we don’t live on the surface.”
“Gentlemen, we’ll go with you.”
“Leave your horses right here. Josecito — ” he pointed to one of his followers “ — will stay to keep an eye on them, although it’s hardly necessary. For your peace of mind.”
“Let’s go,” Clarke said. Gauna came up, his eyes still bleary.
The Indian again:
“Far be it from me to give you advice, but I’d just like to mention that it seems one of your party is still asleep.”
“Mister Gauna?” said Clarke, somewhat put out at what he considered an unnecessary dig at his tracker’s continuing breathing problems. “Don’t worry about him. I don’t think he’s sleepwalking.”
“Right. I beg your pardon,” said the Indian.
“Are you feeling all right, Gauna?” Clarke asked him, to draw the matter to a close.
“Perfectly fine.”
“Just a moment,” the Indian interjected, pointing to the gaucho. “Is this Gauna?”
“Who else could he be?” Clarke answered, by now exasperated.
“What’s his name then?”
The Englishman followed the direction of the savage’s gaze, and was not a little surprised to see none other than Carlos Alzaga Prior sleeping peacefully at his feet.
“Of course, Carlos!” he exclaimed. “I’d completely forgotten him. Just imagine. If you hadn’t pointed him out, I would probably have left him here. I don’t know where I’ve put my head today.” He bent down to wake the youth up, but stopped halfway. “Look how he’s sleeping. The sleep of the innocent. Isn’t it a shame to wake him?”
“A real shame,” agreed Gauna.
Clarke shook Carlos. He pulled his boots on sulkily.
“These gentlemen,” Clarke told him, “have invited us to take breakfast in their tents, which just happen to be nearby.”
“They are not tents,” the Indian corrected him, “but we do hope our food will be to your liking.”
“Well then, let’s be off.”
The savages asked them to follow. They walked a short way into the whiteness, and Clarke realized that the fog was not solid, but occurred in pockets. They climbed up among the rocks, not far, but probably just enough: it seemed that at any moment they must reach the ceiling of mist, but instead it appeared to climb with them. Suddenly, without any transition, they were walking in an interior. It was obvious they had entered a cave. As they were still surrounded by mist for a while, their eyesight had time to grow accustomed to the new surroundings.
Pleased with the surprise he had given them, the Indian, after nudging the companion he was walking alongside (the third Indian was behind, next to Gauna, at whom for some unknown reason he was staring with open admiration), turned and said:
“We live in here.”
“How incredible!” exclaimed Clarke.
“You can have some beer and cakes as soon as we get there.”
“That’s all right, I’m not particularly hungry.”
“Can you see?”
“More or less.”
“We’ll soon have torches.”
Sure enough, a little further on, where the cave became narrower and really dark, the Indian took some small torches from the wall and proceeded to light them. Each of the three Indians held one and positioned themselves alongside the visitors, to shine it down at the floor for them. The ground was of a whitish stone, and was worn quite smooth by the tread of bare feet. It soon began to tilt downward, so that they had to take more care of how they walked. They turned bends, went down rough-hewn steps, sometimes even had to jump. Up ahead and behind them, everything was dark. Clarke had viewed the excursion as something perfectly natural, and far from worrying him, the unexpected turn (or rather descent) events were taking seemed to him delightful. Part of this delight came from the cruel satisfaction of knowing that Gauna must be furious. This reminded him of the tale the gaucho had told him the previous day. He had to admit it was a very solid and plausible story, but that was entirely due to the fact that it included all (or nearly all) the details of what had happened in reality; by the same token, there must be other stories which did the same, even though they were completely different. Everything that happened, isolated and observed by an interpretative judgment, or even simply by the imagination, became an element that could then be combined with any number of others. Personal invention was responsible for creating the overall structure, for seeing to it that these elements formed unities. Of course, Clarke was not going to put himself to so much trouble . . . but he could swear, a priori, that apart from Gauna’s version, there must be an endless number of other possible stories. Moreover, between one story and another, even one that was really told and another that remained virtual, hidden and unborn in an indolent fantasy, there was not a gap but a continuum. And the existence of such a continuum, which at that moment appeared to Clarke as an undeniable truth, created a natural multiplicity, of which Gauna’s story was shown to be merely one more example. But Clarke had no intention of telling Gauna this, because that would be to run the risk of no longer counting on his company. To Gauna, his story was not simply one among many, but the only one.
Even though they were going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, they could still feel currents of air, and from time to time crossed chambers with lofty ceilings. Then all of a sudden a light shone ahead of them. “We’re almost there,” their Indian guide said. Turning to his companion who was still admiring Gauna, he told him: “Llanquén, go and tell Pillán.”
“OK,” Llanquén said, and scuttled off.
“Welcome to our humble abode, Gauna, Carlos, and Mister . . .”
“Clarke,” said the Englishman, who had not previously introduced himself
“Equimoxis, at your service.”
“What an odd name.”
“My mother had a priest name me: it was taken from a book found in an ox-cart wreck in the Andes many years ago. The book was called Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb.”