an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

by Cesar Aira

  All this led Krause to a conclusion that was almost as bewildering as the story of the innocent assassin: compensation was alien to the Indians. In fact this conclusion derived from a thought that had often crossed his mind (and not only his): every physical defect, however minor or inevitable, even the gradual, imperceptible wear and tear of aging, requires a compensation, in the form of intelligence, wisdom, talent, practical or social skills, power, money, etc.

  This was why Krause the dandy attached so much importance to his physical appearance, his elegance and his youth: they allowed him to dispense with everything else. And yet, as a civilized man, he could not escape from the compensatory system. Painting, his art of choice, was a way of complying with its minimal requirements. Requirements which, until that day, he had considered absolute; without a minimum of compensation it would be impossible to go on living. But that was before he had seen the Indians, and now he had to admit that they did not respect the minimum—on the contrary, as objects of painting, they made fun of it. The Indians had no need of compensation, and they could allow themselves to be perfectly coarse and unpleasant without feeling any obligation to be well-dressed and elegant to make up for it. What a revelation it was for him!

  But no sooner had he said this than he remembered the state of his poor friends face (hidden though it was behind the mantilla) and began to worry about how Rugendas might interpret his disquisition.

  Needless scruples, for his friend was plunged in the deepest of hallucinations: the non-interpretive kind. In a sense, Rugendas was the one who had taken non-compensation to the limit. But he did not know this, nor did it matter to him.

  The proof of this achievement was that while conversing silently with his own altered state (of appearance and mind), he continued to see things and, whatever those thing were, they seemed to be endowed with "being." He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares what they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is that they are.

  Some might say these altered states are not representative of the true self. So what? The thing was to make the most of them! At that moment, he was happy. Any drunk, to pursue the comparison, can vouch for that. But, for some reason, in order to be happier still (or unhappier still, which comes to the same thing, more or less) one has to do certain things that can only be done in a sober state. Such as making money (which more than any other activity requires a clear head) so as to go on purchasing elation. This is contradictory, paradoxical, intriguing, and may prove that the logic of compensation is not as straightforward as it seems.

  Reality itself can reach a "non-compensatory" stage. Here it should be recalled that Mendoza is not in the tropics, not even by a stretch of the imagination. And Humboldt had developed his procedure in places like Maiquetia and Macuto ... in the midst of that peculiarly tropical sadness: night falling suddenly, without twilight, the sea washing back over Macuto again and again, futile and monotonous, the children always diving from the same rock ... And what for? What where they living for? So they could grow up to become ignorant primitives and, worse, deplorable human ruins by the time they reached maturity.

  In the afternoon everything became stranger still. The action had shifted away from El Tambo, so the two Germans set off in search of more views, guided by noises and hearsay. If the San Rafael valley was a crystal palace, and the tributary valleys its wings and courtyards, the Indians were coming out of the closets, like poorly kept secrets. The scenes followed one another in a certain order, but their traces on paper suggested other orders, which, in turn, affected the original scenes. As for the landscape, it remained indifferent. The catastrophe simply came in on one side and went out on the other, changing nothing in between.

  The Germans continued with their work. New impressions of the raid replaced the old ones. Over the course of the day, there was a progression—though it remained incomplete—towards unmediated knowledge. It is important to remember that their point of departure was a particularly laborious kind of mediation. Humboldt's procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature. Direct perception was eliminated by definition. And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness. This is something that happens in everyday life, after all. When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. And it seems impossible to ascertain those thoughts except by a long series of inferences. What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else's mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing happens with a painter and the visible world. It was happening to Rugendas. What the world was saying was the world.

  And now, as if to provide an objective complement, the world had suddenly given birth to the Indians. The noncompensatory mediators. Reality was becoming immediate, like a novel. The only thing missing was the notion of a consciousness aware not only of itself but of everything in the universe. Yet nothing was missing, for the paroxysm had begun.

  The afternoon was not a repetition of the morning, not even in reverse. Repetition is always a matter of waiting, rather than the repeated event itself. But in the grip of the paroxysm, there was no waiting for anything. Things simply happened, and the afternoon turned out to be different from the morning, with its own adventures, discoveries and creations.

  In the end, Rugendas collapsed, slumping onto the paper, struck down by a terrible cerebral seizure. Faint moans could be heard emerging from the balloon of black lace, inflated and deflated by his labored breathing. He slipped over Flash's neck, his stick of charcoal still pirouetting in the air, and fell to the ground. Krause got down to help him. Off in the distance, against a superb background of pinks and greens, the Indians were scattering, so tiny they could have been mounted on mosquitoes.

  Like a Mater Dolorosa, Krause held the unconscious body of his friend and master, under crowns of foliage multiplied to infinity. The trills of a sky-blue cephalonica encircled the silence. Night was falling. It had been falling for some time.

  In the last, miraculously drawn-out light, soldiers and ranchers gathered at the fort to debrief. The horses were exhausted. The riders hung their heads, speaking in mournful grunts; all were grimy, their faced powdered with dust, some were falling asleep in the saddle. Krause joined one of the parties, with Rugendas slung over the back of his horse, sleeping off a dose of powdered poppy extract, his head hanging level with the stirrup, which gave it a ding like a bell's clapper at every step. The mantilla, however, had remained in place. Night had fallen by the time they reached the fort, and they reached it none too soon, for the darkness was absolute.

  Rugendas woke at two, in a dreadful state. Swinging back and forth between sickness and health throughout the course of that incredible day had left him a wreck. Yet he resumed his work without a moment's delay. And the strangest thing was that he did not remove his mantilla, simply because he had forgotten that he was wearing it. He and Krause were in the situation room at the fort, feebly lit by a pair of candles; a murky gloom reigned in that vast space. The poor painter could see nothing through the veil, but did not realize. His vision had been so perturbed during the day, that not being able to see made no difference to him now. Thrashing about blindly, he was an outlandish sight, and his shuffling of the papers attracted the other men's attention. He had taken it into his head to classify the scenes, and since he could not see them, he got so mixed up that the contortions of his body, understandably
limited by his shattered nerves, seemed to be mimicking the postures of the Indians. Krause could not bear to see him make a spectacle of himself and slipped out discreetly, as if he were going to relieve himself. Less tactful, the soldiers and ranchers gazed in wonder at the puppet with the wrapped- up head. The obvious solution would have been to tear the rag off, but this did not occur to Rugendas because he was so used to it, while, for precisely the opposite reason, the others were too stunned to act; there was only one person who, being in between these extremes, might have done the sensible thing, but he was not present.

  At that moment, Krause was experiencing a revelation of his own. Depressed and preoccupied, he had gone out into the blackest of nights. He could sense the forests and mountains as pure after-images, black forms plunged in an ocean of black. After an uncertain lapse of time spent in melancholy rumination, he suddenly realized he could see everything: the mountains, the trees, the paths, the panoramas with their slightly dreamy perspectives ... Was he seeing or remembering? He marveled at the faculty of sight, its prodigious, ultra-physiognomic capacities, the dilation of the pupil, the brain's interpretations. In fact, the moon had come out, that was all. And yet he had not been mistaken.

  Back inside, the men had been waiting for the moonlight so they could return to their respective homes. They put on their hats and went out. That was when Rugendas, who had not been entirely oblivious to their conversations, noticed the owner of the ranch where he had stayed the previous night, and by association, remembered his wife and what she had lent him, at which point he finally raised his hands to his face, felt the lace, realized he was still wearing the mantilla and pulled it off without bothering to untie the knots. In spite of the fact that it was now a filthy, malodorous rag, soiled with grease, sweat and dust, he held it out, trying to make his numb tongue articulate words of thanks intended for the rancher's wife. All eyes were fixed on him, in wonder as much as in fright. When the rancher was finally able to respond, he mumbled a no, still mesmerized by Rugendas. What he meant to say was that the painter could return the mantilla himself and thank his wife in person, since he would presumably be returning to the ranch with them to spend the night. But when the monster insisted, he took the rag, and as there was nothing more to say, let the conversation lapse and stood there staring. What an ugly sight! The reason he had initially refused the filthy shroud was that, unconsciously, he had wanted to say: Keep it on.

  They all came out together, and when Krause saw them, he went to fetch the horses; he too was assuming that they would return to the ranch from which they had set out that morning. As he approached the group, leading the two beasts, it took him a moment to realize that Rugendas had removed his mask. He had grown used to it too, from the other side. His friends face, fully illuminated by the moonlight, seemed larger now and more frightful. He froze for a moment. The men were beginning to mount and ride off. Krause had thought they would have to carry Rugendas, but there he was, standing, steady enough, except for his face. His face occupied the compartments of the night. Was the moon illuminating his face or was it the other way around?

  Be that as it may, Rugendas had made other plans. To Krause's astonishment, he had plans for the rest of the night. Incredible as it seemed, he wanted to go on working. What did it matter if he was ill, since the remedies he had taken allowed him to begin again with undiminished energy? And what could be more common than the act of beginning again? It was being repeated all the time. What else could really be repeated? In the beginning was Repetition, and only there. It was Krause, not Rugendas, who by virtue of his health, was moving along an unbroken line, a continuum, without beginning or end.

  Krause did not understand what Rugendas had said to him. The painter's face overpowered everything else, even speech. Besides, there was no time to talk, since they were already riding, just the two of them, not towards the ranch but into the forest, drawn into the twisting funnels and bottlenecks, the horses clattering like bronze octopuses, southwards, towards the unknown, guided by the painter's facial compass. Tall, slender silhouettes, as if they were riding giraffes, all in black yet visible, they sped on, sucked towards another and a further slice of space, slipping in among the black's grey shades. The sound of the galloping hooves preceded them and bounced back, warning of obstacles. In that sense they were like bats. Like the bats that abound in those mountains and come streaming out of their caves at that time of night. And they could feel them brushing past! It is extremely uncommon to feel the touch of a bat, because those little creatures are equipped with infallible anti-crash devices. But a touch is not a crash, and occasionally sheer speed makes a touch unavoidable. Which is what happened to Rugendas on this occasion. A bat coming in the opposite direction brushed gently against his forehead. The contact lasted barely a hundredth of a second; it was hardly distinguishable from a breeze or the chance stimulation of a cell. But in the world of nature, there is always an explanation for delicacy. And this delicacy was supreme, incomparable, not only because of the mechanism that produced the contact, but also because of the material that sensed it: a forehead in which all the nerves had been torn loose. What could possibly be gender or subtler?

  This last part of the episode is even more inexplicable than the rest. Yet we cannot doubt that the events really took place, since the artist recorded them in his subsequent correspondence. In his letters he apologizes to family and friends, and principally to his sister, for what he calls his "daring"—though "recklessness" might have been more apt—in going to observe the Indians at close quarters, so he could complete the days sketches, filling in the foregrounds. There is, of course, a certain irony in his words. After all, what could have happened? They might have killed him. A minor detail. In any case, by the time his correspondents saw the resulting pictures, that is by the time his work reached European galleries or museums, he would certainly be dead. The artist, as artist, could always be already dead. There was something absurd about trying to preserve his life. An accident, big or small, could kill a man, or a thousand, or a thousand million men at once. If night were lethal, we would all die shortly after sunset. Rugendas might have thought, as people often do: "I have lived long enough," especially after what had happened to him. Since art is eternal, nothing is lost.

  He was in the lead. He had heard the soldiers at the fort say that, after a battle, the Indians usually camped close by. Weary of the distances that had given form to the raid, they could not wait to have done with them and stopped a stone's throw away.

  For that reason, or perhaps because the Germans had been riding so quickly, they arrived almost at once. Beside a waterfall, on a broad platform of pink schist, the Indians were dining. They had built fires and were sitting in circles around them. Not a thousand of them. That had been an exaggeration. A hundred. The stolen cattle were in a small field nearby, surrounded by the horses to stop them from wandering. The Indians had butchered twenty for ribs and sirloins to roast, and had already begun to eat. To say that they were astonished to see the monstrous painter break into the circle of light would be an understatement. They did not believe their eyes. They could not. It was an all- male gathering: no women or children were present. Had they wanted to, whatever they might have said, the Indians could have taken the plunder back to their tents, a few hours' ride away. But they had decided to make a night of it: using the raid as an excuse, they had left their women waiting, worried and famished. Not that they needed to get away from the women to get drunk and go wild; they were capping off the foray with a binge, just to please themselves and to hell with the others. The drinking had begun with an aperitif, in the local manner. They swigged from the bottles they had managed to steal. Drunkenness and guilt fused into terror when they saw that moonlit face, that man who had become all face. They did not even notice what he was doing: all they could see was him. They would never have been able to guess why he was there. How could they know that there was such a thing as a procedure for the physiognomic representation of nature, a market hu
ngry for exotic engravings, and so on? They did not even know that there was an art of painting, and although they possessed that art in some different, equivalent form, they could not establish the equivalence.

  So Rugendas was able to enter the circle of firelight undisturbed, open his pad of good canson paper and go to work with charcoal and red chalk. Now he really was at close range and every detail was visible: big mouths with lips like squashed sausages, Chinese eyes, figure-eight noses, locks matted with grease, bull necks. He drew them in the blink of an eye. The paradoxical effect of the morphine had made him extra quick in his application of the procedure. He went from one face to another, one sheet to the next, like a lightning bolt striking a field. And the resulting psychic activity ... A brief aside is apposite here: psychic activity is normally translated into facial expressions. In the case of Rugendas, whose facial nerves had been lacerated, the "representation commands" from the brain did not reach their destination; or rather they did, unfortunately, but scrambled by dozens of synaptic confusions. His face expressed things he did not mean to express, but no one realized, not even Rugendas, because he could not see himself. He could only see the faces of the Indians, which to him were horrible too, but all in the same way. His face was not like any other. It was like the things that no one ever sees, like the reproductive organs viewed from inside. Not exactly as they are—in that case they would be recognizable—but badly drawn.

  The tongues of flame flickered higher, splashing the Indians with golden light, illuminating a detail here, another there, or plunging everything into a sudden wave of darkness, animating the absent gesture, endowing mindless stupor with a continuous activity. They had begun to eat, because they couldn't resist, but everything they did led them back to the center of the fable, where drunkenness was mounting. Following their foray, a painter had emerged from the night to reveal the delirious truth of the day's events. Owls began to moan deep in the woods and the terrified Indians were captured in swirls of blood and optical effects. In the dancing firelight, their features drifted free. And although they were gradually beginning to relax and crack rowdy jokes, their gazes kept converging on Rugendas: the heart, the face. He was the focal point of that waking nightmare, the realization of the terrifying possibility that had haunted the raid in its various manifestations over the years: physical contact, face to face. As for the painter, he was so absorbed in his work that he remained oblivious to the rest. In the depths of that savage night, intoxicated by drawing and opium, he was establishing contact as if it were simply another reflex. The procedure went on operating through him. Standing behind him, hidden in the shadows, the faithful Krause kept watch.