an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

by Cesar Aira

  Krause was not alone in his appreciation of Rugendas's work. It was obvious how well he painted, primarily because of the simplicity he had attained. Everything in his pictures was bathed in simplicity, which gave them a pearly sheen, filled them with the light of a spring day. They were eminently comprehensible, in conformity with the physiognomic principles. And comprehension led to reproduction; not only had his one published book been a commercial success throughout Europe, the engravings illustrating his Picturesque Voyage through Brazil had been printed on wallpaper and even used to decorate Sèvres china.

  Krause would often refer, half jokingly, to this extraordinary triumph, and in the solitude of the Cordillera, with no one else there to see, Rugendas would smile and accept the compliment, which was accompanied but not undercut by gentle, affectionate mockery. This was the spirit in which he considered the suggestion that a drawing of Aconcagua be used to decorate a coffee cup: the greatest and smallest of things conjoined by the daily labor of a skilled pencil.

  Yet it was not so simple to capture the form of Aconcagua, or any given mountain, in a drawing. If the mountain is imagined as a kind of cone endowed with artistic irregularities, it will be rendered unrecognizable by the slightest shift in perspective, because its profile will change completely.

  In the course of the crossing they were constantly making thematic discoveries. Themes were important in genre painting. The two artists documented the landscape artistically and geographically, each in accordance with his capacities. And while they could comprehend the vertical, that is the temporal or geological, dimension unaided, since they knew how to recognize schist and slate, carboniferous dendrites and columnar basalts, plants, mosses and mushrooms, when it came to the horizontal or topographical dimension they had to rely on the Chilean guides, who turned out to be an inexhaustible source of names. "Aconcagua" was only one of many.

  The landscape's structuring grid of horizontal and vertical lines was overlaid by man-made traces, which were gridlike in turn. The guides responded to reality without preconceptions. The varying weather and the whims of their German clients, whom they regarded with a combination of respect and disdain so reasonable it could hardly offend, made the changeless world they knew by heart resonate with mystery. The Germans, after all, represented the meeting of science and art on equal terms, as well as the convergence, but not the confusion, of two quite distinct degrees of talent.

  Travel and painting were entwined like fibers in a rope. One by one, the dangers and difficulties of a route that was tortuous and terrifying at the best of times were transformed and left behind. And it was truly terrifying: it was hard to believe that this was a route used virtually throughout the year by travelers, mule drivers and merchants. Anyone in their right mind would have regarded it as a means of suicide. Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once. Jagged lines, impossible angles, trees growing downwards from ceilings of rock, sheer slopes plunging into mantles of snow under a scorching sun. And shafts of rain thrust into little yellow clouds, agates enveloped in moss, pink hawthorn. The puma, the hare and the snake made up a mountain aristocracy. The horses panted, began to stumble, and it was time to stop for a rest; the mules were perpetually grumpy.

  Peaks of mica kept watch over their long marches. How could these panoramas be rendered credible? There were too many sides; the cube had extra faces. The company of volcanos gave the sky interiors. Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess. Grey expanses hung out to dry forever in colossal silence; air- shafts voluminous as oceans. One morning Krause said that he had had nightmares, so their conversations that day and the next turned on moral mechanics and methods of regaining composure. They wondered if one day cities would be built in those mountains. How might that be? Perhaps if there were wars, when they ended, leaving the stone fortresses empty, with their terraced fields, their border posts and mining villages, a hardworking frontier community composed of Chileans and Argentineans could settle there, converting the buildings and the infrastructure. That was Rugendas's idea, probably influenced by the military painting of his ancestors. Krause, on the other hand, in spite of his worldly outlook, was in favor of mystical colonization. A chain of affiliated monasteries perched in the most remote attics of stone could spread new strains of Buddhism deep into the inaccessible realms, and the braying of the long horns would awaken giants and dwarves of Andean industry. We should draw it, they said. But who would believe it?

  Rain, sun, two whole days of impenetrable fog, night winds whistling, winds far and near, nights of blue crystal, crystals of ozone. The graph of temperature against the hours of the day was sinuous, but not unpredictable. Nor, in fact, were their visions. The mountains filed so slowly past that the mind amused itself devising constructivist games to replace them.

  A series of studies in vertigo occupied them for the best part of a week. They encountered all sorts of mule drivers, and had the most curious conversations with Chileans and Argentineans from Mendoza. They even came across priests, and Europeans, and the guides' uncles and brothers-in-law. But their solitude was soon restored, and the sight of the others receding into the distance was a source of inspiration.

  For some years, Rugendas had been experimenting with a new technique: the oil sketch. This was an innovation and has been recognized as such by art history. It was to be exploited systematically by the Impressionists only fifty years later; but the young German artist's only precursors were a handful of English eccentrics, followers of Turner. It was generally thought that the procedure could only produce shoddy work. And in a sense this was true, but ultimately it would lead to a transvaluation of painting.

  The effect on Rugendas's daily practice was to punctuate the constant flow of preparatory sketches for serial works (engravings or oil paintings) with one-off pieces. Krause did not follow his example; he was content to witness the frenetic production of these pasty little daubs with their clashing acid colors.

  Eventually it became clear that they were leaving the mountain landscapes behind. Would they recognize them if they passed that way again? (Not that they had any plans to do so). They had folders full to bursting with souvenirs. "I can still see it in my minds eye ..." ran the stock phrase. But why the mind's eye in particular? They could still feel it on their faces, in their arms, their shoulders, their hair and heels ... throughout their nervous systems. In the glorious evening light of the 20th of January, they wondered at the assembly of silences and air. A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridge-top path, moving at a star's pace. The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and blood-lines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability, and the sketches they had made, in so far as they had any value, stood as records of this permeation. The infinite orography of the Cordillera was a laboratory of forms and colors. In the meditative mind of the traveling painter, Argentina opened before them.

  But looking back one last time, the grandeur of the Andes reared, wild and enigmatic, excessively wild and enigmatic. For a few days now, descending steadily, they had felt an exhausting heat closing around them. While his soul dreamt on, contemplating that universe of rock from the last lookout, Rugendas's body was bathed in sweat. A wind at high altitude stripped tufts of snow from the peaks and flung them towards the toiling painters, like a devoted servant bringing cones of vanilla ice cream to refresh them.

  The landscape revealed by this backward glance revived old doubts and crucial quandaries. Rugendas wondered if he would be able to make his way in the world, if his work, that is, his art, would support him, if he would be able to manage like everyone else ... So far he had, and comfortably, but that was due in part to the energy of youth and the moment
um he had acquired through his training at the Academy and elsewhere. Not to mention good luck. He was almost sure that he would not be able to keep it up. What did he have to fall back on? His profession, and practically nothing else. And what if painting failed him? He had no house, no money in the bank, and no talent for business. His father was dead, and for years he had been wandering through foreign lands. This had given him a peculiar perspective on the argument that begins "If other people can do it ..." All the people he came across, in cities or villages, in the jungle or the mountains, had indeed managed to keep going one way or another, but they were in their own environments; they knew what to expect, while he was at the mercy of fickle chance. How could he be sure that the physiognomic representation of nature would not go out of fashion, leaving him helpless and stranded in the midst of a useless, hostile beauty? His youth was almost over in any case, and still he was a stranger to love. He had ensconced himself in a world of fables and fairy tales, which had taught him nothing of practical use, but at least he had learnt that the story always goes on, presenting the hero with new and ever more unpredictable choices. Poverty and destitution would simply be another episode. He might end up begging for alms at the door of a South American church. No fear was unreasonable, given his situation.

  These reflections occupied pages and pages of a letter to his sister Luise in Augsburg, the first letter he wrote from Mendoza.

  For suddenly there they were in Mendoza, a pretty town with tree-lined streets, the mountains within arms reach and skies so immutably blue they were boring. It was midsummer; the locals, stunned by the heat, extended their siestas until six in the evening. Luckily the vegetation provided plenty of shade; the foliage filled the air with oxygen, so breathing, when possible, was very restorative.

  Armed with letters of introduction from Chilean friends, the travelers stayed at the house of the attentive and hospitable Godoy de Villanueva family. A large house overshadowed by trees, with an orchard and various little gardens. Three generations inhabited the ancestral home in harmony, and the smaller children rode around on tricycles, which Rugendas duly sketched in his notebooks; he had never seen them before. Those were his first Argentinean sketches, portents of an interest in vehicles that would soon develop unexpectedly.

  They spent a delightful month in and around Mendoza and its environs. The locals bent over backwards to welcome the distinguished visitor, who, invariably accompanied by Krause, made the obligatory excursions to the ranges (which were no doubt more interesting for travelers who had come from the other direction), toured the neighboring estates and generally began to soak up the spirit of Argentina, so similar to Chile in that town near the border, and yet, even there, so different. Mendoza was, in effect, the starting point for the long eastward voyage across the pampas to the fabled Buenos Aires, and that gave it a special, unique character. Another notable feature was that all the buildings in the town and the surrounding country looked new; and so they were, since earthquakes ensured that all man-made structures were replaced approximately every five years. Rebuilding stimulated the local economy. Comfortably riding the seismic activity, the ranches supplied the Chilean markets, exploiting the early maturation of the cattle, speeded by the dangers emanating from the underworld. Rugendas would have liked to depict an earthquake, but he was told that it was not a propitious time according to the planetary clock. Nevertheless, throughout his stay in the region, he kept secretly hoping he might witness a quake, though he was too tactful to say so. In this respect, and in others, his desires were frustrated. Prosaic Mendoza held promises that, for one reason or another, were not fulfilled and which, in the end, prompted their departure.

  His other cherished dream was to witness an Indian raid. In that area, they were veritable human typhoons, but, by their nature, refractory to calendars and oracles. It was impossible to predict them: there might be one in an hour's time or none until next year (and it was only January). Rugendas would have paid to paint one. Every morning of that month, he woke up secretly hoping the great day had come. As in the case of the earthquake, it would have been in poor taste to mention this desire. Dissimulation made him hypersensitive to detail. He was not so sure that there was no forewarning. He questioned his hosts at length, supposedly for professional reasons, about the premonitory signs of seismic activity. It seemed they appeared only hours or minutes before the quake: dogs spat, chickens pecked at their own eggs, ants swarmed, plants flowered, etc. But there was no time to do anything. The painter was convinced that an Indian raid would be anticipated by equally abrupt and gratuitous changes in the cultural domain. But he did not have the opportunity to confirm this intuition.

  Despite all the delays they allowed themselves, and their habit of letting nature encourage and justify their lingering, it was time to move on. Not only for practical reasons in this case, but also because, over the years, the painter had gradually constructed a personal myth of Argentina, and after a month spent on the threshold, the pull of the interior was stronger than ever.

  A few days before their departure, Emilio Godoy organized an excursion to a large cattle ranch ten leagues south of the town. Among the picturesque sites they visited on the trip was a hilltop from which they had a panoramic view of forests and ranges stretching away to the south. According to their host, it was from those wooded corridors that the Indians usually emerged. They came from that direction, and in pursuit of them, on a punitive expedition after a raid, the ranchers of Mendoza had glimpsed astonishing scenes: mountains of ice, lakes, rivers, impenetrable forests. "That's what you should be painting ..." It was not the first time he had heard this sentence. People had been repeating it for decades, wherever he went. He had learnt to be wary of such advice. How did they know what he should paint? At this point in his career, within reach of the vast emptiness of the pampas, the art most authentically his own was, he felt, drawing him in the opposite direction. In spite of which, Godoy's descriptions set him dreaming. In his imagination, the Indians' realm of ice was more beautiful and mysterious than any picture he was capable of painting.

  Meanwhile, what he was capable of painting took a new and rather unexpected, form. In the process of hiring a guide, he came into contact with a supremely fascinating object: the large carts used for journeys across the pampas.

  These were contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge. The first time he saw one, he gazed at it intently for a long time. Here, at last, in the cart's vast size, he saw the magic of the great plains embodied and the mechanics of flat surfaces finally put to use. He returned to the loading station the next day and the day after, armed with paper and charcoal. Drawing the carts was at once easy and difficult. He watched them setting off on their long voyages. Their caterpillar's pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week, provoked a flurry of quick sketches, and perhaps this was not such a paradox in the work of a painter known for his watercolors of hummingbirds, since extremes of movement, slow as well as quick, have a dissolving effect. He set aside the problem of the moving carts—there would be plenty of opportunities to observe them in action during the journey—and concentrated on the unhitched ones.

  Because they had only two wheels (that was their peculiarity), they tipped back when unloaded and their shafts pointed up at the sky, at an angle of forty-five degrees. The ends of the shafts seemed to disappear among the clouds; their length can be deduced from the fact that they could be used to hitch ten teams of oxen. The sturdy planks were reinforced to bear immense loads; whole houses, on occasion, complete with furniture and inhabitants. The wheels were like fairground Ferris wheels, made entirely of carob wood, with spokes as thick as roof-beams and bronze hubs at the center, laden with pints of grease. To give an idea of the carts' real dimensions, Rugendas had to draw small human figures beside them, and, having eliminated the numerous maintenance workers, he chose the drivers as models: imposing characters, equal to their task, the
y were the aristocracy of the carting business. Those hyper-vehicles were under their control for very considerable periods of time, not to mention the cargoes, which sometimes comprised all the goods and chattels of a magnate. Surely it would take a lifetime at least to travel in a straight line from Mendoza to Buenos Aires at a rate of two hundred meters per day. The cart drivers were transgenerational men; their gaze and manner were living records of the sublime patience exercised by their predecessors. Turning to more practical matters, it seemed that the key variables were weight (the cargo to be transported) and speed: the less the weight, the greater the speed and vice versa. Obviously the long-haul carters, given the flatness of the pampas, had opted to maximize weight.

  And one day, suddenly, the carts set off... A week later, they were still a stone's throw away, but sinking inexorably below the horizon. Rugendas, as he informed his friend, was possessed by an urgent, almost infantile desire to depart in their wake. He felt it would be like traveling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras, perhaps even before the inconceivable beginning of the universe (he was exaggerating), overtaking them all on their journey towards the truly unknown.

  They set off on that trail. Following that line. A straight line leading all the way to Buenos Aires. What mattered to Rugendas, however, was not at the end of the line but at its impossible midpoint. Where something would, he thought, finally emerge to defy his pencil and force him to invent a new procedure.

  The Godoys bid him farewell most affectionately. Would he come back one day? they asked. Not according to his itinerary: from Buenos Aires he would proceed to Tucuman, and from there he would head north to Bolivia and Peru, before eventually returning to Europe, after a voyage of several years ... But perhaps one day he would retrace his South American journey in reverse (a poetic idea that came to him on the spur of the moment): once again he would see all that he was seeing now, speak all the words he was speaking, encounter the smiling faces before him, identical, not a day younger or older ... His artist's imagination figured this second voyage as the other wing of a vast, mirrored butterfly.