Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  Duval went on smoking and drinking, and paid the lieutenant no more heed. The gray sky had turned white, and over the horizon the atmosphere was hatched with oblique stripes of yellow sunlight and blue rain. The soldiers drowsed, their bellies full. Duval went for a walk along the row of wagons, trying to overcome the weakness he felt after vomiting. He made himself walk as much as he could every time they stopped, even though his weariness had grown with the passing days and finally soaked into every bone in his body. Only by walking could he dispel the melancholy caused by continual contact with the horses, which were so different from those he had ridden in Europe that at times he could hardly believe they belonged to the same species. The creole breed was a contradiction, a blemish on the animal kingdom, and of the many surprises afforded by the journey, those creatures were the greatest. He had changed horses three times already, replacing them as they died (one had expired under him, startled by a tiny dancing moth) with others that were no less fainthearted: distorted masses of viscera, skin and dry hair, held together by fear alone. Now he walked as far away from the horses as he could, staring at his boots and the clumps of grass. The oxen he found more bearable, although they were monstrous too: excessively cylindrical, with their little snake-like heads.

  He would, of course, have been happy to endure these eccentricities of the New World had he found himself in less disturbing company . . . He threw a sidelong glance at the prisoners, wondering how they could bear the immobility. The mere thought of it was enough to make him stagger. For barely half an hour, at dusk and under the strictest supervision, they were unchained and allowed to get out of the wagons, but most of them preferred to stay where they were. It was surprising that they had survived so many weeks of vegetable stillness, packed in together and barely fed. He wondered how the army could justify the expense of transporting them to the forts, since they were barely alive by this stage. But of course he had no idea what went on there at the edge of the world. And those unfortunates may have been hardier than their conditions would have lead one to presume; according to the lieutenant, they often rioted, and that was why they were subjected to a control that never relented, not for one minute, and grew in severity as the train pursued its journey into the province.

  Duval never went near the wagons, and the stench they were giving off that day was unbearable, as if the rain had released the most revolting effluvia from the tortured bodies of the prisoners and the depths of their changeless bedding — in spite of which they were sleeping or staring impassively into space. Suddenly a woman’s hoarse voice asked him for a cigarette. Startled, Duval pretended not to hear her and, in his confusion, threw the cigarette he was smoking into a puddle. At night, the officers would take some of the women and ride away with them. At the first stream they crossed after leaving Buenos Aires, they had made the prisoners wash and cropped their hair, but hygienic measures after that had been rudimentary. Duval, of course, had abstained from all contact. In the wagons, promiscuity reigned, and seemed, like so many other things on this journey, to waver between the permissible and the prohibited. The elusiveness of the laws in force had been demonstrated in a particularly brutal way not long before. In one of the wagons, a man was copulating noisily with a being of indefinite sex, in broad daylight, without hiding. This was not an exceptional sight, and no more offensive than many others; it was merely surprising that any of them still had the energy. Duval, who was riding nearby, didn’t even avert his gaze. He was about to spur his horse along when he saw the swollen, livid face of the lieutenant, passing him and heading for the wagon. Lavalle was clearly having a bad day, and yet he acted with an apathetic indifference, just as his victim would have, given the opportunity. Leaning to one side of his English saddle, he grabbed the man by the hair, and, with a single jerk, detached him from his companion and threw him out of the wagon. The man was left hanging head down from the chain attached to his bony ankle. Duval, who had thought that the punishment would end there, watched in astonishment as the lieutenant severed his genitals with a slash of his saber, and the man passed out, bathed in his own blood. He remained in that position until he died, and it was only three days later, when the stench of the corpse was making the air unbreathable all along the wagon train, that Lavalle consented to getting rid of the body.

  The sun was already setting when one of the guides who was riding ahead lifted his hand to signal the first glimpse of Azul and the surrounding settlements in the distance. Duval, possessed by a weariness that had grown too large for his physical body to contain, was improvising a ballad to the rhythm of his horse, a ballad about the dusk, repeating words in his melodious native tongue and thinking (as he had thought every day at that hour for more than a month now) that a novel could be written about those changes of color in the sky and the transformations of the clouds between say, six and eight, so long as the author confined himself to the most rigorous realism. The resulting novel, a report on atmospheric colors, shifts, and flows, would be the apotheosis of life’s futility. Why not? A supremely stupid saga; the world was ripe for such a work, or would be by the time he finished writing it. Every evening he observed that clichéd daily chaos with passionate attention, and dreamed. An avid reader of novels since childhood, his favorites had been adventures in wild, exotic locations, and now that he found himself in such a setting, he realized that what counts in the unfolding of an adventure is how the days repeat one another exactly. “Adventures,” he said to himself, “are always adventures in boredom.”

  Although Duval’s eyesight was good, he was the only one who couldn’t see; the others were pointing directly at the setting sun, and it was dazzling him. But a couple of hours later, when the lieutenant gave the order to halt, Duval could make out rows of huts distributed over an area that seemed limitless. He inquired about the strange form looming on the horizon.

  The lieutenant replied that it was the fort.

  “But it must be enormous!”

  “Not really. You lose your sense of proportion out here.”

  And thereupon he invited the Frenchman to dine with him in Azul. Although surprised by the sudden courtesy, Duval accepted with pleasure and waited while the lieutenant organized the setting up of the camp and the roster of sentries, duties that he discharged with an obvious aversion. Then they set off at a gallop, just the two of them, in the last of the daylight.

  Azul, at that time, was what might be called a typical desert settlement: no more than four hundred white inhabitants, almost all of them huddled together in a palatial fort, and somewhere between five and six thousand “tame Indians,” who did everything, while the masters tended their idleness, dreaming of economic or military exploits. The Indian tents were scattered between the tributaries of a gray river that flowed sluggishly to the south, from which the white people refused to drink because, they said, its water had a brackish aftertaste; so they used wine and liquor to quench their thirst, with predictable results. The fort rose up in the middle of the settlement: originally a square stockade with watchtowers at the corners, it had expanded disproportionately in all directions because of the swelling population within. It had come to resemble a Tower of Babel, or rather a motley toy city, with tiny huts clinging to the walls, chaotic hives of rooms piled one on top of another, bridges and suspended passageways with children running across them, and women hanging washing from precarious lines.

  When he was able to take his eyes off this fantastic construction, Duval realized that he was passing through the suburbs where the savages lived; many were sitting peacefully on the ground with cigarettes between their fingers, showing absolutely no interest in the strangers. It was the first time he had seen Indians, and he would have liked to examine them more closely, but the lieutenant was rushing on, and he didn’t want to be left behind.

  The fort did not have gates. They proceeded at a walking pace through a maze of shacks until they reached the headquarters, an imposing stone edifice with two asymmetrical wings. An
Indian stationed at the door took charge of their horses and clearly found them amusing. Lavalle brushed the dust from his uniform and removed his gloves. Haughtily, he ordered a subaltern to announce his presence to the colonel. After the formalities, a lieutenant led them down long corridors to an anteroom plunged in almost total darkness, where he left them for a minute.

  In the commander’s office, two pink crystal oil lamps lit up the heavy mahogany and bronze furniture. Colonel Leal was a small and distinguished-looking old man, with white hair and a sad, kind face. He embraced the lieutenant, who called him “uncle,” and turned ceremoniously toward Duval, with whom, once introduced, he began to speak in fluent French, without an accent.

  “I’m absolutely delighted by your visit. I have so few opportunities to practise my French here . . .”

  “It’s perfect, I can assure you. Have you lived in France?”

  “I spent long years in your dear country, before the accession of the tyrant, of course.”

  It took Duval a moment to realize that he meant Bonaparte. Treading warily, he changed the subject.

  “But here, the language . . .”

  “Quite, my dear friend. No one speaks the sweet tongue of Ronsard on the pampa. Why should they? I can’t think of a single valid reason. Sometimes I’m surprised not to have forgotten it myself. If not for my books . . . And a few of my officers who, luckily, are educated . . . But you’ll find out for yourself! There won’t be many people you can talk to there in Pringles, and my colleague Espina certainly won’t be one of them,” he concluded, laughing.

  Espina was the commander of the fort in Pringles. The rumors about him were most alarming and had become a source of grave preoccupation for Duval, who would be under the man’s orders, and his alone, once he reached the frontier. Espina was said to be a semi-savage, with Indian blood in his veins, excited by horrors and tyrannical in the extreme.

  The colonel poured out three glasses of cognac and chatted animatedly for a while with his nephew. Duval, sunk in a large armchair, drowsed in a haze of fatigue and lethargy. Asked if he would like to take a bath before dinner, he replied with an almost incredulous yes. It seemed absurd: the civilized world had become an illusion; but the colonel rang a little bell, and ordered an aide to take Duval to one of the guest rooms and prepare the bath for him. The engineer followed the servant like a puppet. He smoked while he waited, then took off his clothes and lowered himself into the water with a rictus of pleasure that was almost painful. Half an hour later he was drying himself with a large white towel. Before dressing he powdered and perfumed himself, using the flasks on the dresser. He noticed with some surprise that the pink wallpaper was only one of many feminine touches: perhaps it had been the room of a mistress. He threw himself onto the bed and dozed for a while until the same servant came to take him to the dining room.

  At dinner, with the commander, Lieutenant Lavalle, and two other officers, the conversation was conducted entirely in French. The barefoot servants attending them had to constantly replace the bottles of champagne, which emptied themselves as if by magic. Each time they came in or went out, the candlelight flickered, setting off delicious verbal scintillations in the mind of the Frenchman, who after an initial moment of anxiety, discovered that he was indeed able to eat and drink abundantly, and proceeded to do so without a moment’s respite. He enjoyed the evening, although he was melancholically aware that the brilliance of the conversation and the consummate skill with which his companions obliged him to assume the metropolitan’s disdainful superiority were mirages that would vanish in the blink of an eye. After all, he said to himself, good manners are an illusion, transparent as the air, and these dreadful, contradictory gentlemen exist merely to represent the inoffensive emptiness of strategy. Lieutenant Lavalle was carving a duck with silver instruments; from time to time he threw Duval a glance that was difficult to interpret.

  The Frenchman’s gastronomical misadventures during the voyage, related in detail by the lieutenant, were a source of great amusement. Duval burst out laughing too and, as he polished off a dozen oysters, wondered if it hadn’t all been a dream. The story of the viscacha, still fresh in memory, made the colonel laugh until he cried.

  “I too once tried to eat one of those filthy rodents,” he said. “With the same result.”

  They spoke of the natives and their food.

  “With the animals they hunt,” said one of the local officers, “the Indians prepare more sophisticated meals than you might expect, given their poverty. But it’s hard for a white men to get used to that food, and if he does, he tends to lose his taste for conventional fare.”

  “No great loss,” said Lavalle.

  His uncle contradicted him: “It could be a source of endless melancholy.”

  He spoke as if from personal experience. There was something quite mysterious about the colonel. Duval wondered what curious fortuity had brought these refined bon vivants to the desert. After a while, the conversation returned to matters of more immediate concern. The lieutenant, who had been away from Pringles for almost a year, asked for news of the town, but the others could tell him very little. Although they had all been there at least once, the officers in Azul regarded Pringles as remote and inaccessible, almost like Indian territory. Besides, they were busy enough with their own problems: two months earlier, Azul had received the unexpected visit of a raiding party . . . Startled, Duval listened attentively. There had been ten thousand Indians, in a lightning attack; they came at night on their fastest horses, rustled all the cattle, leaving a thousand cut throats behind and almost all the soldiers without wives. For weeks the settlers had been forced to live on game and fish; the flocks were just being replenished.

  “Which tribe were they from?” asked Lavalle.

  “We don’t know. You should have seen them: painted, with their feathers . . . Quite a show. They seemed to have come a long way. Our ‘tame’ Indians said they were Catriel’s warriors, but that’s very doubtful.”

  Colonel Leal said that right after the attack he had sent a detachment to Pringles, thinking that it might have been laid waste, because it was on the route the raiding party must have taken. But no. They hadn’t seen the columns of warriors, and they didn’t even let the detachment spend the night in the fort. Needless to say, Leal’s officers were not granted an audience with Espina.

  “As you see,” he concluded, “the stronghold remains impenetrable. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn’t do better to simply forget that it exists.”

  “Something just occurred to me,” said Lavalle. “Could it be that Espina has negotiated a separate peace agreement with Catriel?”

  Leal laughed noisily.

  “No, absolutely not! None of the important chiefs, and Catriel least of all, would bother doing that. In fact I don’t think the Indians even know there’s a fort there, because it’s hidden by the very forest whose limits it’s supposed to secure. When they set off on a military expedition, the savages come out onto the pampa leagues and leagues before getting to Pringles, to save time.”

  He turned to Duval and proceeded to give him a supplementary explanation:

  “The idea of establishing two lines of forts, dreamed up by the incompetent Alsina, was hopelessly premature and overambitious; it merely created a no-man’s-land that’s impossible to guard, where the hordes can roam about as they like. The new line, with Pringles as its central point, was supposed to render our defensive forces obsolete, and allow settlers to take up land. But no: the attacks keep coming just as often and unexpectedly, while Pringles is ever more distant, like a planet drifting out of our gravitational field.”

  He took a gulp of champagne before continuing: “In fact, given the adverse conditions, the fort should have failed, and would have, if not for Espina. Without him, Pringles would vanish in a moment. In that deranged environment, his defects have turned out to be virtues: his wildness and savagery have preserved
him from the violent death he no doubt deserves. He’s also notoriously stingy, which stimulates his initiative. He has done deals with certain tribes, and maintains a very brisk trade with them; we once received, for example, some pieces of the Indians’ famous white pottery. Not only that: he prints money, like the caudillos in Entre Rios . . . He can get away with anything because of his miraculous capacity to survive, though it’s not at all clear that his survival is of any use to us, as the raiders showed when they came to visit a few days ago.”

  The image that Duval was forming of this character was laden with dark overtones. He was wondering what it would be like to work for such a man: all-powerful, beyond the law. He didn’t even know what his work would consist of, since he was to receive his instructions in situ from the outlandish colonel himself.

  “And what do you know about living conditions there?” asked the lieutenant. “Have there been famines?”

  “In Pringles? I don’t think so!” The colonel laughed. “Quite the opposite! Although I barely know him, I can assure you that Espina would go without anything rather than food. I suppose he needs it to keep moving, as a crocodile needs its siestas in the mud. And with the forest so close at hand, he has an unlimited supply of large and small game; all he has to do (and he’s had plenty of time) is find one of those valleys full of jaguars and deer. Whether or not the Indians let him intrude on their preserve is another matter. But Espina is very resourceful. He belongs to that caste of prosperous barbarians with a gift for handling reversals of fortune; they always come out on top, although they’re magnets for adversity. A few years ago,” Leal continued, still addressing himself to the Frenchman, “shortly after the foundation of the fort, there were rumors of cannibalism, false of course, the sort that often circulate in circumstances like that; indeed it might be said that no foundation is complete without such a myth. I once sent the colonel a cutting from the Las Flores newspaper, with a caricature of him as Nebuchadnezzar eating grass . . . But don’t be alarmed, you’ll soon be able to see for yourself that it’s all a fabrication; these days, I imagine, Espina prefers the charatas he buys from the Indians, stuffed with truffles and plums by his cooks.”