by Cesar Aira
“Isn’t trade with the Indians forbidden?”
“The arm of the law is not that long. Whatever happens from here on,” the colonel said, gesturing to indicate the land to the west, “is beyond the control of any authority or legislation. But you know, oddly, I don’t think Espina’s trading contravenes any order, since he’s using money that he prints himself; so from the central government’s point of view those deals simply don’t exist.”
The servants refilled the glasses, allowing Duval to drown his astonishment. The colonel changed the subject: “I don’t envy those poor wretches you’re taking to Pringles,” he said with a sigh. He was speaking to the Frenchman. “If you thought the conditions they traveled in were bad, wait till you see what the poor devils will have to bear, men and women alike . . . Except the women attractive enough to be chosen for the harem . . .”
He looked inquiringly at Lavalle, who shook his head: “Forget it. She would have been sold to a rancher in Buenos Aires. These women are for the troops, although they’re so battered and burdened with children, I suspect not even the soldiers will deign to accept them.”
“In that case . . . They won’t survive for long. Since the fort was built, ten years ago, the convoys of prisoners have kept coming, one a year, with more than a thousand convicts each time, and the white population of Pringles today is no more than three hundred! Of course we are speaking of individuals cast out by society once and for all . . . But why condemn them to such short and unproductive lives, when it would be simpler to have them work as laborers or servants? Another of our stupid government’s many whims. You haven’t noticed any signs of change?” he asked his nephew, whom he knew to be on good terms with certain people who worked for the Chief of Staff.
“Not in the least. In fact, I think the opposite opinion prevails. I wouldn’t be surprised if they began to use banishment to punish even less serious crimes.”
“Is there much desertion?” Duval asked.
The colonel chose to answer metaphorically: “Beyond a certain limit (I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to this: we’re always speaking of limits and frontiers here) everything is desertion, since no one is in the right place.”
After the chocolate rolls with ice cream, they got up and went to the colonel’s library for coffee. He had chosen to entertain them in his private quarters because Lavalle was a relative and in deference to the foreign guest. The bound volumes covering the walls, a few old oil paintings of hunting scenes, the leather armchairs and the dim light created the anomalous atmosphere of an English club. The strong, aromatic coffee was ready, but Duval was not surprised to see that they all preferred to keep refilling their brandy glasses.
The colonel invited him to take a seat beside his own.
“Perhaps we have frightened you a little with our chatter,” he said confidentially. “But pay no attention. We get bored and pass the time gossiping, so I dare say our stories were rather tall. In Pringles, despite everything, you will find some of the comforts that make for an agreeable life. It’s such a decadent place . . . You’ll be able to have as many servants as you please and, whatever the nature of your work, you’ll have a great deal of free time.” His face took on a dreamy look. “And I assure you that leisure in Pringles is something to savor. Eight years have passed already since I was there for the first and last time, and I still remember it: the forest, El Pillahuinco, is a paradise . . . I don’t believe there’s a region in the world to match its beauty. Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté,” he concluded, tracing an arc with his cigar.
The young engineer did not reply, nor did he know what to think. When he retired, before midnight, he found that his bed had been made with silk sheets. He found it difficult to go to sleep under a roof, in a bed, and he woke up with the first light of dawn, although there was not a sound to be heard.
They spent the following day and night in Azul, taking on provisions for the remaining thirty days of the journey. The troops were camped a league from the fort, and from morning to night, curious locals ventured out on horseback or in buggies to set eyes on the terrible prisoners bound for the frontier. But the actual sight of those remnants was disappointing: months in chains had reduced them to skin and bone.
The Frenchman had lunch with the colonel, just the two of them this time, except for the deathly soldiers who, with pale and brittle hands, served them crumbly woodcocks and mashed potatoes. Above the colonel’s tiny bald spot, two identical scenes carved in the wood paneling caught Duval’s eye, but discerning what they represented was beyond his powers of concentration. The soldiers wheeled in a mahogany mixing bowl, from which they served the ice cream with a silver spoon. The end of the meal went on for hours, the old man talking nonstop in his antiquated French, downing glass after glass. Eventually, having emptied six bottles of champagne and one of brandy, and tossed the corks for the colonel’s cat to chase, they fell asleep in armchairs in the study. When they woke, the colonel asked his guest if he would be interested in a tour of the settlement, to which Duval replied that what he would most enjoy would be to meet the Indians.
Leal’s cheeks contracted in a vague smile.
“You’re bound to see them, there are so many. But don’t get your hopes up; they’re fundamentally dull.”
“I thought they would surprise me.”
“Quite the contrary.”
The colonel sent for a lieutenant who spoke French and introduced him to Duval. The lieutenant was a young man, barely out of boyhood, with blond hair, translucent skin and feminine features. The Frenchman guessed that he must be another scion of the plutocracy sent to the provinces to complete his education. He was loquaciously timid.
“Machines or Indians,” was the choice he proposed.
“Indians, of course,” replied the engineer. “Pistons and pulleys are dead as dinosaurs. I want to see my savage brothers.”
The young man laughed.
“They’re not savage any more, regrettably,” he said.
They went to the Indian camp, riding little silky white mares. The dwellings, scattered over a great expanse, all a long way apart, reared in the pallid air. Didn’t the dispersion make them more vulnerable to attacks? True, the lieutenant admitted, but that was of no consequence at all. The tents were too small, life too vast. Had they all been reflected on a needle-point, they would still have been out of place in the landscape. Was there some order to their disposition? The lieutenant said no, but the Frenchman, whose eye was topographically trained, thought he could distinguish a double arc, albeit irregular, which his guide dismissed as an illusion, pointing out that every time there was a raid, the Indians took refuge in the fort and their dwellings were razed. When they came out again, they rebuilt them haphazardly.
“But that’s what I was referring to, that randomness,” said the Frenchman.
“They put them up anywhere.”
“Palaces have been built in random places too.”
He was distracted by the unusual quantity of dogs, and by their curious appearance: small, like dwarf greyhounds, with pointed muzzles (which might have indicated a change in their feeding habits, following the extinction of American mice), light gray in color, and totally mute.
“How do they feed them?” asked Duval.
“They’re as frugal as angels,” replied the lieutenant. “An insect, a blade of grass, that’s all they need.”
He caught one so that Duval could feel its weight: a quarter pound at most, maybe less, the Frenchman reckoned, stroking the animal. They could not have moved had they been any heavier, for there was almost no strength in their muscles, and their bite, as Duval was encouraged to discover for himself, was as harmless as the suction of a butterfly.
Equally striking were the numerous children running around everywhere in big shrieking bands or dragging complicated paper toys: they were uniformly thin, with prominent abdomens
and straight black hair. Their voices had a delicate timbre and always sounded distant.
“All the women do is procreate,” said the lieutenant, indirectly explaining the acoustic effect. “If it’s not their husbands getting them pregnant, it’s the soldiers, who are always coming to visit. The flow of births is steady, continuous, and unlimited, and it raises questions that remain unresolved, since the communism of the Indians makes it impossible to group them into families. Strange, isn’t it? So far, no one has come up with a way to exploit the situation.”
“Exploit?”
There was no reply. Duval felt a shiver run down his spine as he tried to imagine the kind of schemes an imaginative adolescent might hatch on that virgin yet extraordinarily populated frontier. The mechanisms of prehistory are too hard to leave behind, he thought. Perhaps he should have gone to see the machines instead.
Suddenly he realized that his young host had no secrets: he was laying his whole being bare to the casual observer, and the most inflexible necessity ordained that it should be so. Duval could travel all over the world, it would always be the same: human beings were devoid of mystery. It was something they had never possessed: that was what made them human. When this revelation came to him, at that precise moment in his life, Duval felt a great liberating surprise. He was surprised to discover that there was no need to go to Laputa or Pringles in search of oracles. What an utter waste of time!
Dinner was copious, and this time it was served in the fort’s main dining room, with all the officers in attendance, wearing dress uniforms and white gloves. Indian musicians played; there was a long drinking session. Since the colonel liked to sleep in, and they would be leaving at dawn, they took their leave that evening, Lavalle for a few months, since he regularly traveled to the capital with dispatches, the engineer for a year, the duration of his contract.
“We’ll see each other again in twelve months’ time, then,” said Colonel Leal, and added: “It will be an unforgettable experience, from which you’re well equipped, I’m sure, to draw the most valuable lessons.”
The next morning, after a few hours’ march, Azul disappeared from view, and once again they found themselves in the solitude of the pampa, which was even flatter and emptier than before. The only relief from that vastness was provided by enormous ombú trees, which appeared every two or three days, always in isolation. The ombús were curious plants, deformed by the atmosphere, similar to baobabs, though not nearly as tall, with big weary branches resting on the earth and poisonous leaves of a green so dark it was almost black.
The absolute monotony of the journey continued, except that the night watch had to be reinforced because they were now in Indian territory. On the clearest days they could make out the blue line of the mountains on the horizon, and from time to time they thought they could see horsemen in the shimmering distance, but under scrutiny the figures vanished. One afternoon a stronger breeze than usual began to blow (there were no real winds in the region, Duval was told), and since it was coming from the west, it brought a vague scent of vegetation, which the soldiers claimed to recognize as the smell of El Pillahuinco. The Frenchman filled his lungs, trying to absorb the emanations. He breathed and breathed, methodically, telling himself that otherwise he would die of boredom.
Spring advanced little by little. Sometimes their route took them across vast carpets of tiny red and yellow flowers, covered with bees; sometimes they marched for leagues through fields of camomile, which released an intoxicating odor when crushed, or over little violets, so numerous they turned the plain blue and hid the earth. The grasses were no more than five or six inches tall; only the odd lonely thistle rose higher, its lilac tuft impregnated with pollen, which stained the lazy horseflies.
Rain fell without interruption, day and night, heralding the warm season: it was never heavy, usually no more than a delicate drizzle suspended in the air, without consistency or direction, and hardly noticeable in the end, so used to it had they become. Birds returning from the west passed overhead, always flying singly, very high, flapping silently through the moist air, like fish. Marching over the dwarf chañar trees, the travelers felt like giants treading a miniature forest, which reproduced a real one in every detail. There was a kind of natural bonsai called alpataco, a foot tall.
Every day, whenever the sun was able to slip a ray through a gap in the clouds, they were treated to the spectacle of a rainbow. They never knew where it would appear: sometimes so close that it seemed the slow wagons were about to pass under it; sometimes very far away, fine and fragile as a crystal.
The earth had turned to mud; it made a sensual squelching sound under the animals’ hooves. A profusion of insects emerged interminably from the wet ground: big mosquitos hopping like locusts; spiders spinning dome-shaped webs; pretty green bugs the size and shape of coins, with arabesques that were always different (Duval began a collection, not out of scientific curiosity but for the simple childish pleasure of laying out his specimens on a blanket when the caravan stopped for the night, and arranging them in rows). Above all, there were the grotesque dragonflies with their bulging eyes, which could be popped out with a little squeeze to lie in the palm of the hand like two tiny red balls. They also saw a curious insect, a kind of mantis, which the gauchos called a tata-dios. It was as big as a dove, and had so many joints that its definitive form remained elusive: there was always something more to unfold.
In quantity and effect, however, nothing could match the toads that had appeared from nowhere, mostly as small as partridge eggs but occasionally enormous and disproportionate — there was no in-between. As the horses approached, the toads moved out of the way (those little hops were soon very familiar): beautiful creatures, in shades of bluish to yellowish green, with elaborate, shiny scales on their backs, gobbling insects with an insatiable voracity. Duval was fascinated by their feeding as much as by their sheer abundance. Sometimes, to pass the time, he would try to calculate how many toads there must be in the country’s millions of acres of virgin land. He would multiply the number in a square yard (a hundred) by ten thousand, then multiply that product by a hundred, then by a thousand, then by a hundred million, and even then he knew that he wasn’t close to the total. He amused himself by comparing this quantity with the number of minutes or seconds in a year or a human life, letting his imagination roam among the awe-inspiring multiplications accomplished by those useless creatures. And as he proceeded through that sea of little green jewels, which leaped or froze, hypnotized by the sun, he felt a strange exaltation swelling his breast.
“The species is everything,” he thought, “the individual doesn’t count; man disappears into the world . . .”
What would have disturbed others filled him with an inexplicable delight: he was anticipating pleasures that he had not yet even dreamed of, and with each step he took toward the wild and mysterious west, he felt that he was entering the sacred realm of impunity, that is, of human freedom, the exercise of which was something that he had not been taught in the old world and would have to learn in the forests of America, at the cost of his own dissolution.
Like another part of the same idea, there was the muteness of the animals, which was in keeping with everything else: the men didn’t speak either; the fatigue of the journey had exhausted what little desire to speak they had shown at the outset. They went for whole days without talking, without the exchange of a single syllable among those hundreds of soldiers and convicts.
“Everything is thought,” said Duval to himself. “Language doesn’t exist.”
He let that inhuman serenity enter him and then expelled it with an idea: “Everything is possible. If language doesn’t exist, everything is possible. I’m allowed to do anything.”
In those long hours of rain and calm, the distant screeching of a bird hidden in the scrub or high in the sky, the sharp cry of a lapwing or a buzzard, served only to accentuate the silent stillness of the landscape.
&n
bsp; Nothing on the horizon, day after day. The soldiers rode on and discharged their duties with supreme indifference. Duval had long given up trying to make friends with them. To him they seemed alien, and they were, necessarily, as he was now coming to understand. The soldiers were ex-convicts (like the ones chained in the wagons), who had survived by forfeiting God knows what to the rigors of frontier life, and had managed to adapt to the futility of army routine. Only the pursuit of game stirred them into activity: chasing a rhea with their bolas, or skinning a tremulous Patagonian hare. Sometimes they deigned to consort with the female prisoners, when Lieutenant Lavalle felt like granting his men the dubious pleasure of choosing a partner for the night and had the women unchained so that they could be taken off and enjoyed under cover of darkness.
The silence was manifest in everything; it appeared and disappeared, soft as the air and sometimes hard as stone. Duval breathed, deeply; he breathed as he had never done before, with a kind of tentative belief in life’s reality. At this point in the boredom of the journey, the engineer was suddenly surprised to find himself counting his breaths. He felt that he had discovered the most primitive use of numbers, and thought that if he could keep count of those movements of subtle air, he would arrive at the number of the earth, and silence, and the horses’ fear, and he went on murmuring nebulous numbers to the rhythms of his chest and head. In fact he had lost count right from the start, but that didn’t stop him feeling that it was, precisely, a calculation. He liked to think of it not as an accumulation over time but as the determination of a fundamental unit: a precise, slow, motionless division that he was performing with atmospheric silences. The mathematical fantasies that made the trivial tedium of life in the desert bearable found their natural object in breath’s little butterflies, in that double constancy: inhalation, exhalation.