by Cesar Aira
“I wonder what happens to the storm in the forest.”
It was usual to refer to the forest in this way: it changed everything.
“Nothing,” said Gombo. “The storm doesn’t exist in there; it can’t get in. And even here, the forest is protecting us; on the plains, this house would be blown away. Hold on,” he said when he saw that the cigarettes were ready.
He lifted up the lamp and removed the shade, a cylinder of paper hardened by the heat, which he left on the table. They smoked for a moment.
“In another place, we’d die out. But death is impossible here.” He blew a column of smoke up into the air. “Totally impossible. Absolute protection.” And he added: “Life is impossible, and death as well. Is there anything that isn’t impossible?”
“It’s possible to have children,” said Ema.
“Very true. Now that I think of it . . . the impossibility of life manifests itself differently in men and women, and perhaps in opposite ways. Maybe it’s the only difference between them. And yet life is just as impossible for you as it is for me, or for him,” he said, pointing at Francisco’s cot. “It’s all there is left. It’s impossible for an individual to live within a species, or outside of one. It’s not mysterious. On the contrary.”
He paused (he was in the habit of pausing for a long time between one sentence and the next), and seemed to snap out of his philosophical mood. Pointing at Ema with his cigarette, he said, like a teacher to his pupil:
“If it weren’t impossible, life would be horrific. You’d do well to keep that in mind. Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe life will be possible in a hundred years . . . But luckily I won’t live to see it.”
There was a long silence.
“And yet . . . our life dwells here with us, like a Finnish coach house in the middle of a snowstorm . . . Life is always passing like a cloud, without touching anything or leaving a trace. Just like the storm: it leaves no trace because it repeats itself.”
When Gombo spoke again, his voice was quieter and more shadowy, as if his thoughts had followed a long, secret path and reappeared very far away.
“In fact,” he said, looking at the cigarette stub between his fingers, “We don’t know what effect this might have on our bodies. The same with alcohol. If you ask me, we’ll never know, no matter what progress science makes. It’s like trying to know what time might hold in store for man . . . the miniscule lapse of time between one heartbeat and the next. Chemistry creates time . . . No, no . . . it’s gluttony. A man eats a mushroom: will he have sublime visions or die from poisoning? There’s no way to know. Because of that detail we’re condemned to ignorance of everything in the world.”
Ema tossed the butt of her cigarette into the fire, and Gombo imitated her mechanically.
“Shall I roll another?”
He hesitated for a moment.
“One more, before going to sleep.”
He watched her rolling a leaf that seemed to be pink. There was no thunder, but the whistling of the snow had grown higher and sharper. The whole village must have been asleep. Gombo poured himself a last glass of cognac (the bottle was almost empty) and leaned back on the chair, smoking in silence as Ema laid the mats on the floor . . . Everything seemed to have become slower and quieter . . . Gombo tapped the ash from his cigarette onto the plate with the bones . . .
At that moment one of the walls of the hut tore from top to bottom like wet paper. A violent gust of wind extinguished their one lamp and transformed the warm atmosphere perfumed by cigarette smoke into a chaos of icy smells. The snow’s nocturnal white was slathered with a fiery brilliance. The threatening silhouette of an Indian had appeared in the opening. As he prepared to enter, the torch he was carrying moved and illuminated his body, painted from head to foot with terrifying war patterns. His face was made up to look like a demon, but remained clearly visible. His head was shaven, and he was naked. Within a few seconds, the stunned couple realized that the Indians had mounted a surprise attack on the village, under the cover of the storm.
Before the savage could step inside, Gombo leaped up, grabbed his sword from the chair on which it was hanging, and dealt him a powerful blow to the head, splitting it open. The stream of blood, dispersed by the wind, drenched them both. Ema was beside the cot; she lifted the child out, wrapped in blankets.
“To the fort!” shouted Gombo, over the noise of the storm, while the hut collapsed around them and returned to nothingness.
Although they could barely open their eyes, they glimpsed other Indians approaching. They ran along the anemone path. The storm was at the height of its fury; the snow was blowing in all directions, not just falling from above; sometimes great white blocks of it came away from the ground and crashed into their legs. The clouds flew past like eagles beneath the moon, and when an especially big one hid it entirely, the burning huts were the only source of light. Ema ran stooped over her son, Gombo with his saber aloft.
The nearest hut was blazing like a bonfire, and before they could get past it, they were intercepted by a group of horsemen, who seemed to spring right out of the flames. The high-pitched, inarticulate wailing they could hear came not from the Indians but their horses, who were mincing their tongues with their teeth and spitting jets of blood and foam. Ema just had time to see that the burdens they carried were unconscious women. One of the beasts knocked her down: she saw a nightmare head with eyes bulging from their sockets, all its hair on end, and swollen veins, thick as an arm. It bumped her in the dark, and that was enough to send her rolling over the snow. Her head was spinning, her body possessed by a furious alien movement. When she was finally able to rise to her knees, she was hidden by swirls of snow. She still had the child in her arms, but the blankets had blown away. She was alone.
It was hard for her to stand, heavily pregnant as she was. She remained on her knees for a moment, on the point of fainting. In that daze, all she could see were the chaotic coils of the blizzard. She thought she was staying still, but in fact the wind was dragging her along, as she realized when she collided slowly with a tree, a mulberry whose gnarled trunk provided shelter for a moment, although she was petrified by the whistling of its branches. She bent over Francisco and saw, in the glow of the lightning, that he was crying, although she couldn’t hear him.
Suddenly, an even stronger blast of wind cleared the snow from the air, and for a moment she glimpsed the fort in the distance: silent and dark, bathed in moonlight, like a fantastic edifice erected on some dead planet. She saw Indians ride past with captive women slung over their horses, giving off a livid glow; the savages seemed like mannequins carved from darkness, tattooed with lines and circles. Since none of them had seen her, there was some hope; perhaps the attack was over, and they were going back.
The veils that made everything invisible were coming apart and reforming elsewhere; suddenly they opened before Ema’s eyes, and she could see a cottage a hundred yards away. Flames were rising from its little windows and had made its walls almost transparent; finally the roof exploded in a cloud of sparks.
The moon was hidden. The lightning revealed nothing but a tremendous confusion. The mulberry tree was shaking all the way down to its roots. Ema gave up hope: any moment they would go flying. She clasped her child more tightly.
The dark shape of a horseman loomed, very close; and then he began to approach, very slowly. In the midst of that frenzy, his calm was terrifying. She took him for a soldier, but only for a moment . . . The whinnying of his horse dispelled that illusion. He must have been an Indian who had been left behind and was roaming the village, unable to resign himself to going back without a captive of his own. A ray of moonlight illuminated him: glistening with fat, head shaved, bands of sealing-wax red on his chest.
The moon had come out just to show Emma the savage’s gaze. He came over and leaned down without dismounting, took her under the arms and seated her on the colt’
s neck. A moment later, the tree blew away.
Off they went. Ema’s perspective changed. They passed burning huts; the fires were a very cold, bluish-violet color. Burning pieces of furniture flew over her head, contrasting beautifully with the black background of sky. With the help of a tailwind, the savage spurred his mount up the slope. At the top, he stopped for a moment; from there the fort was visible with its gates standing open, and the soldiers coming out and running blindly toward the village, holding their sabers aloft, like toy figures. He turned the horse around, and it galloped to catch up with the rest of the raiding party with its burden of women. They forded the river and plunged into the night, heading for the forest.
.
On his annual spring excursion to the island of Carhué, the prince took an enormous retinue, almost three times bigger than was normal for such a trip, including musicians, assistants, masseurs, hunters, bodyguards and a huge number of children, as well as the multitude of hangers-on whose sole functions at court were to sleep and display their splendid headdresses, adjusted to suit the time of day and the circumstances. Against his father’s advice, he had even insisted on bringing the white women given to him in recent weeks, with some of whom he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to spend a night. The old chief’s objections, set aside by his son with a disdainful smile, were rooted, if weakly, in traditional attitudes toward the island, a sacred refuge not to be sullied by the ambiguous presence of white people. It was understandable that Hual paid little heed to his father’s opinion, since the island had been losing its holy character for decades and becoming the desert’s most fashionable resort, the place where the richest chiefs gathered in summer, not in search of any kind of magical protection but merely to soak up the ambience of luxury and ease, and to indulge in more sensual pleasures. Nevertheless, all unawares, the prince was revealing remnants of the archaic disposition to nomadism by insisting on taking all the trappings of everyday life, however much it complicated the trip. He wanted to travel undiminished in body and soul. Watching him prepare to go on vacation with such a crowd, people predicted that he wouldn’t get much rest, but in the end these criticisms came to nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders. After all, if a wealthy minor chief wanted to travel in the company of all his minions, or transport every last one of his greyhounds and parrots hundreds of miles for a stay of a few weeks, just so he wouldn’t feel homesick, that was his prerogative.
A few days beforehand, a party of young men had set out with the portable dwellings which they would erect on the island. Hual gave them many instructions, and a mass of drawings and diagrams specifying his requirements: not just the dimensions and forms of the tents, but also their orientation, their distance from the coast, and a thousand other details.
“Dear Hual,” said one of his captains, without hiding his irony, “if we were to take all this rigmarole seriously, we would have to spend months setting up the shelters in which you want to sleep a week from now.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’ll be time.”
They would have preferred to be guided by the moment’s inspiration, as usual. But Hual was stubbornly opposed to chance; when he was seeing them off, it occurred to him that perhaps they wouldn’t be able to find the island, and he sent for something from his tent.
“Take this map,” he said.
It was a sheet of thick paper, folded into four and covered with inscriptions on both sides. Sighing, they put it away with the rest of the luggage, and said, “Much appreciated.”
Hual went on worrying, and repeated to anyone who would listen that the men were bound to get lost; when he arrived, there would be nowhere to sleep. He almost came to believe these fantasies, and at one point it seemed that he was about to give up the whole idea, but his fears were strenuously dispelled, and finally his party set out one day at dawn, with all the women, a reduced royal guard mounted on gray ponies, and a team of packhorses to carry their effects. The distance they had to cover was barely three miles, but they were taking so many children, and they stopped so often to drink, or take a siesta, or swim in each river they came to, that it took them five long days to get there. Hual was entirely relaxed about this. A tall man, with a well-proportioned, athletic body in spite of the utterly pampered life he led, he was very proud of his long black hair, always oiled and brushed, which hung down heavy as iron and hid half his back. His brutal features were redeemed by his eyes, which gleamed with a marvelous intelligence. His generosity was legendary. His peculiar neurosis consisted of approving every suggestion that was made to him. It was said, however, that in his youth, he had been a sadist. He looked about forty, although he was probably ten years younger.
On the fifth day of the trip, just before nightfall, they arrived at the lake’s southern shore. Two of the scouts were the first to see it; they came galloping back along the trail to announce the good news to the prince and prevent him from calling an ill-timed halt. Suddenly the forest opened out, and there was a chorus of exclamations. In the gray light of the evening they beheld a vast, smooth beach covered with birds. The water stretched away as far as the eye could see. They had hoped to be able to glimpse the island, but in the distance there were only dark mists, from which a tiny, dot-like bird would occasionally escape.
Fascinated by this motionless spectacle, they proceeded to the shore. After consulting with his lieutenants, Hual decided to leave the crossing until the following day. They took flares from the saddlebags to communicate with the advance party and fired them off without waiting for it to get dark. The replies came a few moments later, from the faraway, mist-hidden island: five white flares, and a green one that went spiraling up into the sky before falling into the water.
Hual had his men pitch him a tent in the middle of the beach, and called for drinks and cigarettes. The process of dusk was beginning, with a taut, bright gray. The air seemed to be charged with electricity. The whole company lay down quietly on the gritty sand, even the children.
The warriors were exhausted, they didn’t know why. Overcome by somnolence, they smoked. Some drank themselves to sleep. They should have gone hunting but they didn’t feel up to it, and no one was hungry.
The horses ambled about, bewildered. They took a few steps and stopped to look at the ground, disconcerted by the sand. They waded hoof-deep into the whitish water, but when they tried to drink, they discovered that it was salty and spat it out. The gray of their coats caught the last of the fading light, giving them a ghostly appearance. In the end, they let themselves drop onto the sand, and shut their eyes to sleep.
The greyhounds went back to the forest, where they felt more at home, and lay down among the leaves. From there they watched Hual’s lethargic retinue with phosphorescent eyes.
The air was oppressive, almost unbreathable. It was too hot, although it was only the beginning of September. In spite of their inactivity, the travellers were glistening with sweat. They thought it was because of the water’s proximity. The darkness was gathering, and before it was fully night, a huge yellow moon rose and transfigured them. There was no need to light a fire, so they didn’t. The last thing they saw in the daylight was a big, masked stork flying past in the direction of the forest.
They moved only to pour a drink or lift a cigarette to their lips. One by one, they fell asleep where they lay, stretched out on the sand. By midnight there was no one was left awake. The stillness and the silence were supernatural.
But before dawn, a wild storm broke. The prince’s tent blew away like a piece of paper, huge trees were torn up by the gusts of a freak wind, and all the water in the lake seemed to rise from its bed in a threatening scroll. A torrent of rain poured down. Bundles of flashes, lightning bolts heavy as meteorites.
Even so, few woke to watch the storm, and those who did were barely interested. Most went on sleeping until the first light of day, by which time everything was calm again. They opened their eyes to a world transformed: trees uproot
ed and piled on the beach; the horses buried in sand, with only their sleeping heads exposed like sculptures. The force of the wind had sucked tons of silvery fish from the depths of the lake and scattered them everywhere.
The prince, who always took a massive dose of pills to get to sleep, was the last to regain consciousness, and the most surprised. Speechless, he gazed at the upturned trees, the men digging out the horses, and the fantastic shapes of the sand, so different from the blank platitude of the day before.
But then the sun announced its arrival with gorgeous reds, the birds sang as if nothing had happened, and the savages rose to their feet with their distinctive lofty affability, opulent and well disposed.
A gigantic rainbow spanned the island and the lake in its entirety. Mists streaked with cerulean blue, left over from the storm, were lifting. Someone claimed to have heard the song of the cachila pipit, which was particularly rare. The insects stridulated energetically, as if they had lost their relatives in the confusion of the night.
Not having dined before sleeping, the travelers were hungry, but some felt that it would be better not to lose any time. Hual overruled them equably: while the warriors busied themselves assembling the rafts, the women would cook the best of the fish and mussels cast ashore by the storm, and a choice of the birds that had fallen from the sky. So it was. When they smelled the delicious scent of the food, all the men dropped what they were doing, and even the prince put aside his air of stupefaction to gnaw at the heads of trout and eat wild plums.
The women and the children would travel on the rafts. The horses were fitted with round cork harnesses (no easy task) to help them swim alongside. The warriors would row behind in a folding punt, loaded with all the prince’s chattels. And the prince himself would make the crossing in his bark skiff, with a single rower. When they pushed off, the children exploded with joy, which provoked a grumpy reaction from the prince, who resorted to laudanum and morphine.