Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  They dismounted in the first clearing, a tiny circle of black trees. Set free, the horses and oxen began to nibble big leaves of wild chard, while the dogs sniffed the ground restlessly. Ema was feeling exhausted, so she took her mat well away from the fires and lay down, while the young people, who were wide awake, smoked and drank brandy without, it seemed, a care in the world. They were always at pains to seem carefree because it was more elegant. There were laughs and murmurs, and the paint on their bodies shone in the firelight. Ema let herself drift off to sleep, and when she woke, the first light was just creeping into the sky. Around her, the others were all asleep on their mats or slumped in the grass. She sat up and breathed in the moist, still tenebrous air.

  She went to see the pheasants. They had not yet woken but some were convulsed by nightmares.

  One of the Indian women woke up and stared at Ema as if she didn’t recognize her. She had two circles tattooed on her cheeks, the eye-charms that were known as omaruros. Ema seemed to have the charms too, so neutral and indifferent was her gaze. One by one, the workers got up, and the first thing they did was light the fires again, to make coffee. The sky was taking on color; the birds were still asleep. The horses and oxen were lying on clumps of grass and snoring; rousing them would take some work. The trees’ spore cases had been working all night like mills, and now the fire crackled as the drifting capsules fell into it and burst open. The Indians brushed their hair, and discussed the possibility of taking a swim.

  After various cups of coffee and a cigarette, Ema asked the Indians who seemed most fully awake to come with her and choose the site. They set off at a gallop along the bank. With the sun at their backs, they crossed clearings and wooded zones, pastures and marshes. Ema preferred not to go too far: it made sense for her center of operations to be close to the village.

  She suggested that they ford the river and return on the other side. Halfway back they found a low-lying area of about five hundred acres by the river, smooth and gently sloping, with walls of forest on three sides, bounded on the fourth by the Pillahunico and a beautiful beach. The ground was covered with clover, violets and wild pansies. Here and there a jacaranda, or a lime tree.

  Air and sunlight for the chicks, plenty of water, and the orientation was right. The party dismounted on the beach. The absence of prints indicated that it was not a regular watering place for jaguars or peccaries. They didn’t see alligators either. They discussed where the house should go. Some rode off to explore the surroundings. There were other clearings just nearby, forming an archipelago in the midst of the forest. They wouldn’t find anything better, so they decided to settle here. They went to fetch the carts, which took a long time to cover the distance and, having laboriously forded the river, reached the site at midday.

  After a quick lunch of roasted does and iguana tails, they began work on the buildings, in silence, moving fluently. All the materials that Ema had bought were used. The house was finished the next day, like a strange mollusc that had sprung up in the middle of the clearing. Six yards tall and irregularly shaped, with four rooms separated by curtains. The paper was light ocher, its natural color. Round windows with panes of mica. The Indians preferred to live outdoors, and it wouldn’t occur to them to take shelter within its quivering walls until winter. By then they would have built other houses. Perhaps they would dig them out of the earth.

  Meanwhile, they saw to the pens. When pheasants are subjected to an intensive breeding program, they need a lot of space in which to move around. The birds woke up in a frenzy. Ema had made sure that the cages were facing the forest, so that the pheasants wouldn’t see people. Some way off, there were posts with little paper windmills to amuse them.

  Toward dusk, when the cries of the birds were becoming unbearable, the pens were finally ready. They were just nets of string stretched from one stake to another. The pheasants tumbled dizzily from their upturned cages, falling beak-first onto the ground, which was covered with tender shoots. The two cocks were put into separate pens, with half of the hens in each. The wailing didn’t stop, but gradually the birds calmed down.

  Looking at those twenty scrawny hens and the two wretched breeding cocks, Ema felt rather depressed. They were yellow pheasants, of the poorest quality, fit only for white people; Indians didn’t even bother to breed them. She was just beginning to grasp the immensity of the task: to fill the vast forest with fine and rare pheasants, and make them a medium for wealth, as secure and convertible as gold. After casting an indifferent eye on the birds, her young helpers went to the river bank for an evening swim and a game of dice.

  They were busy throughout the following days, setting up pens and even building a shed in which to perform tasks of which they had, as yet, no clear idea. They constructed big cages, a hundred yards long, raised on stilts, and individual pheasant houses with gates of sculpted gypsum. Hunting expeditions served to garner detailed knowledge of the spaces in which the future feathered population would range.

  Ema sent her cleverest collaborators to make contact with the neighboring tribes and gather preliminary information. Each time, they asked the same question: Where could they find people who would sell them breeding cocks? That was how they discovered that one of the annual breeders’ fairs was going to take place in less than a month’s time, at a village not too far away (five or six days’ march). Since she couldn’t miss this opportunity, Ema sent a message to Espina asking him to hurry up and send her all the money he had printed so far. She began her preparations. Only her closest friends would go with her.

  The commander wasted no time in responding to her urgent request: he turned up the next day in person, which was unheard of, since he hardly ever left the fort, and had never been known to make a personal visit. His interest in this business venture was becoming conspicuous. He brought a cart full of bills.

  He arrived at midday, when the whole team of young workers was swimming in the river, and Ema was sleeping on the beach in the sun. She went to greet the colonel and invited him to step into the house. Espina pointed to his cart.

  “I saw,” said Ema, laughing. “Four oxen! Is it that heavy?”

  Two strong pairs of white oxen were indeed yoked to the cart.

  They went in. The colonel flopped down onto one of the rush mats. Girls came in to hold his cigarettes. Ema poured out two glasses of wine. She told him when and where the fair would be held, and said that she had decided to attend.

  Espina sighed with half-closed eyes.

  “As if you weren’t aware that it’s absolutely forbidden. But I suppose there’s no other way to build up your breeding stock.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  He smoked for a moment in silence.

  “And will that be enough?” he asked, referring to the wagon outside.

  Ema’s only reply was a “serious smile.”

  Sounds of laughter and splashing carried from the river. Someone came to announce that lunch was ready. Ema and the colonel went to sit on the grass, under some lime trees, far from the others. The meal consisted of woodcock and trout, and herbal brandy. Espina drank like a fish and ate like a tiger. The song of a kingfisher interrupted him for a moment, and must have made him feel nostalgic, because he began to tell Ema about the early days of the fort.

  “When I arrived,” he said, “there was nothing here, absolutely nothing. We built the fort years later; back then we lived under the trees, moving every night, never satisfied. As well as indigence, we had to endure the tortures of courtesy. The Indians looked down on us. We had to create a whole system of luxury to distance ourselves from the void. In that sense, my dear, it might be said that I was among the discoverers of the horror vacui. Then as now, the Indians thrived, with their obstinate vitality, while we were bored to death. Their supplies came through a chain of traders who were dealing with Baigorria. They received shipments of European liquor. We drank water.” The mere thought of it made him si
gh. “That was when I understood the importance of setting up a financial system. Until then I had thought that such a system could only be a form of sophistry or deception, one more way of complicating everything and humanizing destiny. But then I realized that it was a necessity: the animal essence of man.” He struck a philosophical pose. “Life is an art: the art of staying alive. All the rest is trickery. But life is the ultimate trick, the only lie that can rise up against time. And here I am to prove it. You only have to look at me. I’m so old you could all be my grandchildren, but I’m protected by a great wall of scandals. Who else could boast so many?”

  “What have scandals got to do with it?” asked Ema.

  “Scandal is the superstructure of vice. And vice is the key to life. Life has no function, while vice is a function and nothing else, cut off from life. The only purposes life can have are dead. Vice has no limits. Vice is equivalent to knowledge. Vice,” Espina added with a long dreamy sigh, “is immediate, limited, instantaneous, permanent. And there are so many vices! The longer I live and build up experience, the less I understand how the life of an individual can suffice to give an idea of how many vices there are. And yet it does . . .

  “And what is the link between vice and scandal, between the key to life and its most important manifestation? Money, magnificent, fabulous money, to which everything refers. And value, too. Value is an impalpable fluid, colored by all the iridescent oscillations of man’s most curious propensity: to print.

  “But I have strayed from my topic. I was telling you about the early days in Pringles. A strange time, which seemed eternal precisely because of its fleetingness. The monetary system was my obsession, and even before the fort was built I had an idea. I remembered what had happened in Canada in the early days of the colony: the governor signed playing cards and put them into circulation as paper money. I did the same. Luckily the soldiers had brought many packs of cards, and they lasted us a whole year.” Espina burst out laughing and slapped his thigh noisily. “Oh yes! Good times! In my appetite for innovation, I went even further. I introduced a very special element: the joker. It could have any value that its owner chose to give it, without limits . . . They all thought it would cause chaos, but I managed, with the help of despotic ambiguity. They all thought that having a joker would make you the owner of the world, but it turned people into timorous chickens. The new cards circulated. Nothing happened. The jokers were an unattractive denomination: no one wanted to hold onto them for longer than a day. They stopped you thinking. It was too easy. Now the other forty denominations have disappeared, but the jokers are still in circulation, although, of course, they have traveled far and wide, all over the Indian empire. You didn’t see one there by chance?”

  Ema shook her head.

  “Back in those days, the Indians had good printing presses. They got them from the north, via Baigorria. They were always robbing the poor defenseless settlers. In the end we were forced to steal a machine from a minor chief just nearby, a certain Lubo. (Later on, he moved away, God knows where. Without a press, he felt emasculated.) We mounted a commando operation. It was one of those butterfly presses, with one bed for the plates, another for the paper, and a screw to press them together. There were two cork rollers to ink the plates. And a huge crank handle for feeding the paper. A clapped-out, prehistoric contraption, and the racket it made was horrendous, ha!” Espina imitated the juddering and laughed. Then he sighed. “But when the first bills came out, it was so exciting. I can almost see that sheet now: a dull gray, printed on one side only, with forty bills that we had to cut with scissors because we didn’t even have a guillotine. One of the great moments of my life, perhaps the most important of all . . .” And turning to face Ema, the colonel added: “Perhaps you’ll feel the same way when you see your first batch of purebred pheasant chicks breaking out of their shells, shaking themselves, chirping, and starting to sing . . .” He noticed the young woman smiling and changed the subject. “I don’t know why I’m telling you these stories. Everything is different now; with the press that I’ve managed to set up we’ve reached a point where there is no hard way to get rich. Strange, isn’t it?”

  Ema thought about it. The colonel had the feeling that she would never find it strange. Neither that nor anything else. Could anything seem strange to her, the captive woman, in the midst of that edenic humanity, whether by day or by night? Smoking, eating pigeons, playing dice?

  .

  An Indian holding an enormous pole, six yards long, with a ball of feathers at each end, appeared at the top of an ilex tree, visible through an oval-shaped gap in the leaves. Birds and squirrels were constantly visiting the tree, but all eyes converged on the acrobat. In the sudden silence, the ting of a triangle rang out, prolonging the slight anxiety. The acrobat, an Indian of intermediate age, was so high up that he seemed no bigger than a doll to those below, with a shaved head and feet painted with lime, unadorned except for a broad strip of white paint around his waist like a cotton bellyband. He was gripping the pole in the middle and balancing imperceptibly. In the end, after lengthy preliminaries, during which the triangle kept ringing, he set off walking, apparently on air — in fact on a rope, invisible from below. With very quick, effeminate steps, he reached a place over the heads of the multitude, who were lunching in the open air, and stopped. Everyone clapped, and the tightrope walker resumed his quick walking, but at an angle of ninety degrees, drawing a murmur of alarmed surprise from the crowd. He headed off toward the gnarled top of a pine and disappeared into the mass of needles accompanied by applause.

  Then the children appeared. They glided along those filaments — there must have been dozens of ropes between trees, forming a web — with a nonchalant grace, and some of them were so small that it was hard to see how they could have acquired that exacting skill. No one fell. An accident would have meant instant death, since they were performing at a considerable height. Some seemed to be much higher than others.

  Tightrope walking, the only one of the traditional European circus arts that the Indians had also developed, was a response to the various levels of the forest. An Indian traveling through the Pillahuinco would often come to a boundary where the land began to slope away: everything was transformed and diminished, becoming part of a panorama. This was one of the experiences that had led the Indians to develop their superhuman conception of the world.

  The superhuman condition entails a theatrical or pictorial gaze, the all-embracing gaze that gathers everything under one umbrella. That’s why there are so many parasols in the iconography of the explorers, not because they are needed as shelter from the weak sun of the pampas, so watery it can be hard to discern the pallor of the light from that of the shadows. Likewise the parasol-hats in Darwin’s sketches of the Indians, crude vignettes that always show them about to mount a skinny horse with a human face. Humanity is always the key to interaction with savage peoples: negating, verifying, or expanding the human, transporting it to a world where it does not belong, which is invariably the world of art. Anthropologists tend to get lost in a transparent labyrinth, not unlike the ropes of the aerialists, soaked in a shiny resin. That intricate web reflected only the scintillations of the atmosphere.

  What exactly was it that they were suspending in the air? The Indians were not always impressed by this art of walking on ropes. They accepted it indifferently. Occasionally a very fat man, like a sumo wrestler, would pass swiftly overhead, accompanied by laughter. Bad taste was always latent somewhere in their improvisations. Maybe everything they did had bad taste as its point of departure.

  The function of the little orchestra that accompanied the tightrope walkers was, it seemed, to stop playing — it was continually falling silent. With those artists of suspense risking their necks overhead, there was always an opportunity to create a mysterious silence. According to the legends, the devil himself (whose name was one of the roots of the word Pillahuinco) had given the art of music to man. Not directly, but
via a series of intermediate powers: the diabolical, art, the human . . .

  In the end, the sparse applause that greeted the first performances petered out, and the crowd went on eating, ignoring the show. High up in their leafy niches, the artists were also nibbling at leftovers. The marketplace was full of a motley crowd, sitting on the ground, or lying on blankets and saddlecloths. Chiefs of all ranks from a broad sector of the basin between Carhué and Bahía Blanca had turned up that morning for the annual pheasant fair.

  The host was the chief Calvaiú. It was his turn that year to provide lodgings and preside over the breeders’ general assembly. His engineers had worked for months preparing the showgrounds, which the visitors would tour in the mornings, and they had built an oval amphitheatre outside the village for the sales, which were the high point of the fair because of the bidding wars unleashed by the presentation of exceptional birds.

  The most prominent guests were now having their lunch in a circle at the entrance to the apadana, while the rest were scattered around the marketplace. Hundreds of deer and game birds (including the white charatas that were a pest in the area) had been roasted. All the visitors ate their fill and kept knocking back Calvaiú’s best spumante.

  As always when the grand chiefs had a chance to get together, the topic of conversation that inspired them most was the art of printing money. And since they had all brought their finest work to the sale, there were ample opportunities to compare and note down new ideas. From time to time a murmuring commotion would agitate one of the groups, provoked perhaps by the sudden display of a very boldly designed or exceptionally well-printed bill. They spoke of inks, papers, watermarks, plates, and a thousand technical minutiae. At this stage in the development of indigenous civilization, the only way forward was to innovate within the system of paper money, so the ingenuity of the rich was always vigilant, always on the lookout for novelties. Each chief strove to protect his own “margin of originality,” while doing all he could to intrude upon those of his rivals. They were constantly shifting those margins, pushing them out, as artists do, beyond the reach of thought above all, to make them untouchable.