by Cesar Aira
As he rode into the setting sun, Duval counted, with his watch in his hand. He was trying to work out, approximately of course, how many breaths he had taken since he was born. He imagined the almost insect-like system of specific muscles activated over and over to draw in and then expel the air. It would not be hard to build a machine that would work like that indefinitely, but what use would it be? Set up, for example, on one of those vast plains they were crossing, it would be forgotten for a thousand years . . . Though a more artistic solution, he thought, would be to leave something to represent the machine: a stone, for example (anything would do); he imagined it oblong in shape, the size of a large rat . . . For a moment he could almost see it, vividly there. Caught up in these daydreams, he forgot that he was breathing, and then remembered, with a smile.
None of his fantasies, however, prepared him for the event that would take place a few days later: a manifestation of silence, rather disturbing perhaps, but at least it broke the monotony and gave him something new to think about.
One afternoon they spied something far off to the south: a strip of land that seemed to be billowing. No dust rose for the simple reason that, after the saturating rains, there was none on the ground. Everyone seemed to know what it was, except for Duval, who spurred his horse and caught up with the lieutenant.
“The she-dogs!” said the soldiers.
“Les chiennes?” he asked Lavalle, amazed.
A look of irritation twisted the Lieutenant’s mouth.
“Another absurd contingency, as if there weren’t enough,” he replied grumpily. He seemed to be exasperated by this new development, but there was a weariness to his disgust. It was as if he thought of the plains as a theatre for idiotic events, and this was the straw that had broken the back of his patience.
It was a pack of wild she-dogs, familiarly known as sea lions, and not at all dangerous, Lavalle condescended to reveal, as long as certain basic precautions were taken.
Duval looked at the horizon again. There must have been a great many of them. But no one seemed to be alarmed, except for the horses, quick to sense the emanations of those creatures and trembling more than usual. The soldiers, it seemed, would not bother to hunt them (perhaps they were not edible). The pack kept drawing closer, and given the direction in which it was moving, Duval reckoned it would come very close. It was absurd, but he didn’t care. Those sea lions were not afraid of human beings.
The dogs approached without a sound; they too must have been mute. Although, listening carefully, one could hear a raspy buzzing, made perhaps by their paws on the ground.
Within half an hour Duval could see the sea lions clearly: they were large, slim dogs, similar to greyhounds, all gray in color, with pointed muzzles, long, catlike tails that dragged pitifully, and no ears, hence the name. Their gait was awkward; they lumbered along with a heaviness paradoxical in such dainty creatures. Their clumsiness seemed an affectation, almost a surplus of elegance. But how could they hear? Up until then Duval had believed that all mammals had ears.
Finally the dogs came within a few yards of the humans and horses, passing without so much as a glance. Such a degree of indifference could not be achieved from one day to the next. Seen at close range, their eyes were the most striking thing about them: they were lidless; the pupil floated in a pink oval, without an iris; and the heavy bags hanging underneath gave them a sinister air. They were like the eyes of an old alcoholic, except that they were on opposite sides of the head and both could not be seen at once. The travelers were overwhelmed by the dogs’ smell: a sort of faint civet, yet it filled heaven and earth. Duval’s horse was writhing hysterically, threatening to topple him; he pressed his palms against its neck, trying to calm it down. The soldiers were less considerate; they stunned their mounts with vigorous punching. Duval slowed down and fell back gradually until he was level with one of the last wagons. The prisoners were looking at the sea lions with disdain. Suddenly Duval heard the crying of a child; he turned his gaze from the spectacle of the pack and searched for the source of that very faint sound among the wagon’s equally spectral passengers. Almost all the babies that had come with the women had died in the course of the journey. By the time Duval spied this one, his mother had hushed him by putting a nipple into his mouth; the baby sucked automatically for a moment, then fell asleep. The woman looked up into the Frenchman’s eyes . . .
Duval was disconcerted. He didn’t know if it was because of the unearthly silence or the deep strangeness of the situation or because of some special quality in those distant, catatonic eyes. The woman was wearing the tattered remains of two different dresses and she was so small, so thin and wasted, that she could have been taken for a child. Under a thick layer of filth, her features looked African, and her hair was short, bristling and greasy.
As they left the dogs behind, a melancholy feeling came over the Frenchman. Everything was so futile. This state of mind must have been obvious to the lieutenant, who offered him a swig of brandy.
“Where could they have come from?” asked Duval.
Lavalle shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t hunt them?”
“Occasionally, very occasionally, the men organize a hunting party. I’ve been told that the dogs’ rumps make very good steaks, but I’ve never tried them. If we were short of food, a pack like that could feed the troop for months. Apparently the fat is useful too.”
“I don’t think they’d have much. You can see their skeletons.”
“True. They’re always on the move, even when they’re asleep; that’s why they need a reserve of fat, and because there’s so little it’s especially rich. They live on insects, toads, snakes . . .”
“I’d like to have one.”
“They are quite decorative, it’s true. I know this is hard to believe, but they belong to the same family as seals. Did you notice that they don’t have ears? But I don’t think they could be tamed, they’re so indifferent . . .”
They went on talking for some time; the lieutenant was in an unusually sociable mood. The drizzle had resumed after about thirty hours of respite. Against a dark background of clouds, the air shone, full of crystalline droplets. Lavalle handed Duval his cigar case, which the Frenchman examined; he was astonished to see such pure silver, without the slightest trace of gray.
“It’s white gold,” said the lieutenant, putting it back into his trouser pocket. He launched into a rambling story about the woman who had given it to him, but stopped when he noticed that the Frenchman was miles away, ignoring his lewd tale. Duval was thinking about the convict woman.
“Isn’t there some other way to bring women out here? Wouldn’t some be prepared to follow their husbands?”
“No.”
“Maybe they would.”
“It makes no difference, anyway. Willingly or against their will, they have a function to perform: satisfying the men. Men, on the other hand, have no function in nature. Take us, for example. What are we doing here? Who could say? But the women . . . They change.”
“Change? Into what?”
“Who knows? And anyway, that doesn’t matter either. They are muses. There are many possibilities . . . For some reason best known to themselves, the Indians prize white women as tokens of exchange, so once they cross the frontier, they begin to ‘circulate’ in all kinds of deals . . .”
“Do you mean,” exclaimed the Frenchman, “that they’re sold to the savages?”
“There’s no need to be shocked. Some are taken captive, or a soldier might exchange his wife for horses, or a commander might even present a chief with a bevy of beauties as a token of good will. And that introduces them into a world where they become a form of currency.”
“It seems dreadfully callous.”
“You’ll change your mind, I assure you. These women, as I suppose you will have noticed already, are entirely at our disposal; that’s why I used the word
‘muses.’ Life or death, a white husband or an Indian: for them it’s all the same. You must remember that society has cast them out in the harshest possible manner, leaving them without a destiny, as it were; and the way the Indians use them has precisely the effect of prolonging that suspension, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Poetic, isn’t it?”
This attempt at speculation exasperated Duval.
“Could there really be crimes so serious as to merit such a punishment?”
“They’ve committed trifling misdemeanors, not serious crimes. The punishment is inversely proportional.”
“I don’t understand.”
With a grave air, Lavalle inhaled the smoke of his cigar. He declined to explain.
“It’s a commonplace in ethnology: the much-discussed exchange of women. When you see it for yourself, you’ll realize how harmless it is: an innocent spectacle, and rather pointless, really, like everything else.”
The Frenchman’s mind was wandering again.
“I noticed one of them today . . . She wasn’t the kind of woman who could save a man. Some are too innocuous.”
The lieutenant began to laugh but checked himself and threw a sidelong glance at Duval.
“I hadn’t imagined that you might be interested in one of our passengers. Would you like her?” he asked with his characteristic bluntness. “Which wagon is she in?”
“No, no!” the Frenchman hastened to exclaim. “She looked like a frail old woman . . .”
He said no more — the lieutenant was smoking ironically — and regretted having voiced his thoughts.
That night, as he went for his usual walk around the convoy to stretch his legs, Duval saw the prisoners being unloaded so that they could spend the night on the ground and take a few steps: their daily exercise. They would have preferred to sleep where they had spent that day and all the previous days, and were offering passive resistance, so they had to be forcibly dislodged. It was not yet completely dark; the luxurious gray of the rain was shining in the twilight. The soldiers climbed up the rails of the wagons like monkeys, unfastened the fettering chains and tossed the ends down to their companions, who brutally dragged the prisoners out. Like a sleepwalker, Duval went along counting the wagons, seeing the same scene repeated, until he reached one near the end of the train.
Still visible in that half-light, the convicts were grotesque figures: almost naked, with stick-thin limbs and swollen bellies, moving awkwardly, against their will. The women looked like emaciated dwarves or dolls. After a while, only their silhouettes could be seen, and the occasional glistening of wet chains. No one shouted. The silence was leavened by interjections and moans.
Straight away Duval recognized the woman he had seen before, though she was no more than a fragile outline . . . But he felt that he was being observed in turn by Lavalle’s equestrian shadow. He glimpsed the lieutenant’s smile, pearly with liquor; it was clear from the way his murmuring eyes were fixed on the black-on-black commotion of the convicts that he had followed the Frenchman’s gaze and spied the woman simultaneously, or first, perhaps. Duval moved away immediately and stopped to observe the unloading of the next wagon in a futile attempt to feign indifference. Lavalle had gone in the opposite direction.
During the afternoon, the soldiers had hunted partridges and quail-doves, which they had piled up on ponchos. They were plucking them hastily by the light of the fires, and skewering them on spits for roasting. To everyone’s surprise the lieutenant shared out a barrel of brandy. He uncorked a bottle of champagne that he had chilled with wet paper and balsam leaves, and with sarcastic courtesy invited the Frenchman to share it.
The birds, it turned out, were delicious. After several days of living on biscuits and the occasional strip of jerky, it was heartening for Duval to eat those tender white breasts and wings. Lavalle encouraged him to drink glass after glass of champagne, and became disturbingly voluble.
Duval suspected that he was planning some kind of mischief. And he was not mistaken. As soon as the lieutenant finished his dinner — the men were lapsing into drunken torpor, hunched around the fires — he announced to his aide that he would graciously permit his soldiers to take the convict women of their choice and have their way with them. The news spread. Fired up by the brandy and the prospect of a night’s abuse, the men stumbled over to the wagons, breathing heavily.
There was a moment of confusion, during which Lavalle disappeared, and Duval took the opportunity to move his bedroll as far away as possible and lie down, regretting that for reasons of safety he could not sleep outside the circle of sentries, beyond sight and earshot of that scandal. He had not been lying down for a minute when he saw a woman approaching him. Barefoot, she moved like a tiny, dark, deranged cloud. The light of a fire revealed her features and her half-closed eyes. Even before that, he had recognized her. She became a shadow again. Then she kneeled down a few yards away. Duval knew that she had been sent by the succubus, that she was another of his tricks. He remained as still as a piece of furniture. The woman laid the sleeping baby that she had been carrying on the ground, then came and lay down beside him. The Frenchman looked around vaguely. He must have fallen asleep for a while without noticing, because the camp was very quiet. On the closest bedrolls the officers were groaning and writhing on top of the women, pounding and rocking, but everything had swiveled imperceptibly in the silence, and to Duval it all seemed remote. She was indeed the smallest woman he had ever seen; it had not been an illusory effect of distance. She was in his arms. They coupled. After the act, the engineer took the precaution of washing himself vigorously with brandy from his hipflask.
Two or three hours later he was woken by the light of the rising moon. The night became a sort of day, sad and deserted like the days themselves. Everyone was sleeping; there was not a sound. He turned cautiously toward the woman, and saw that she was very young, perhaps just a girl. He did not touch her, but it was as if she had felt his gaze; her eyes opened and looked into his without any expression, mute and clear. Then she turned to look at the child, who was sleeping peacefully. The Frenchman was carried off by an irresistible drowsiness.
At dawn, she was gone. During the day he kept away from the rear wagons. He would also have liked to avoid Lavalle, but the lieutenant seemed to seek out his company with the sole intent of laughing sadistically into his ear.
The woman returned to him that night, and the next, even though permission to take the female prisoners aside had not been renewed. She and Duval did not speak. He did not even discover her name. She was revealed to him by the moonlight: impassive, with asymmetrical African or Indian features that made her seem permanently distracted or remote. There was something childlike in her gaze; she always seemed to be thinking about something else. Her lips were full and protuberant. Sometimes he woke before dawn and saw her breast-feeding the child. Her small breasts seemed to contain an inexhaustible supply. The Frenchman was entering a world of anxiety, fear and brooding. But the girl disappeared from his mind with the same light steps that brought her into the world.
On the fourth or fifth night the lieutenant had her brought to his own bedroll, before the others had turned in. He took her straight away, in sight of the officers, who went on drinking without saying a word. The engineer was stunned; for a moment, shock held him like a web from which he had to struggle free before he could get up and drag his sleeping bag as far away as possible. Even so, her cries kept him awake. The following morning, Lavalle rode up to the Frenchman’s horse and offered him a cigarette. Duval thought that he was going to excuse himself for what had happened the night before, but no. Lavalle didn’t seem to remember anything.
The rains had finally stopped. The atmosphere of quiet neutrality gave way to a more conventional animation: birds flying about in the sky, trilling in all manner of ways; enormous flocks of cheeping partridges; the dry breathy noise of rheas’ wings . . . And nights full of the whistling of foxes
and the chattering of crickets. The soldiers suddenly became talkative, telling stories and cracking jokes incessantly around the campfires or on horseback, spouting puerile lies with the naivety of the truly barbaric. The nights were warm, and now they had permission from the lieutenant to satisfy their desires with the women whenever they liked. The officers’ favorite was a voluptuous prostitute who wore her hair piled up like an ovenbird’s nest and had been on edge ever since her new situation had forced her to give up smoking.
But the journey was already approaching its end. Scouting ahead, an advance party sighted a river, which meant that they were near Pringles: from there it would be only ten days. To reach that river, they marched for a whole day without resting. As they drew near, they could hear the clamor of the birds; there were tall willows by the water’s edge, swaying in the breeze. Lavalle announced his decision to stay there the next day as well, since the troop and the animals would need a rest before embarking on the final leg.
Duval wandered off as soon as they arrived; what he required to help him recover was a little solitude. He was heartily sick of people. There were too many gazes on the pampa and not enough confined spaces. He followed the bank of the river. The sharp-edged willow leaves hung in walls, providing a glorious shelter. The water flowed deep and slow in the shade. It was a personal labyrinth; he was just coming to realize how tense he had been. A dip, he thought, would do him good, although by that stage in the afternoon, it was no longer hot.
When he plunged in, he was taken aback by the coldness of the water, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. But he swam vigorously to get his blood moving again, and then it was pleasant. Climbing out, he sank into the mud, and had to hold onto the three-sided reeds. After the water, the breeze felt mild; it enveloped him in comforting caresses. He sat on a rock and washed the mud off his legs, then lay down on the grass, in a place where the yellow sunlight was falling. He tried to identify the birds by their songs, unsuccessfully. He had been told that each kind of bird sang the song of another kind, never that of its own.