Ema the Captive

by Cesar Aira

  “Nothing would please me more,” said the colonel, filling a cup.

  He was still drowsily slow. He stretched, stood up adjusting his clothes, and followed Ema out. The sky was still gray, as in the morning, but there was more light. It must have rained while they were having lunch, because the grass was wet.

  Before them stretched the broad floodplain, sloping gently down to the river. Espina could see many Indians sitting or lying on the bank. The odd word or guffaw carried on the breeze.

  Ema brought out two cups of steaming coffee, which they drank standing there. She was followed by Francisco, and the older girl, who had just begun to walk, carrying a naked doll with white shoes.

  “Come with us,” Emma said to the children, and they set off for the guided tour.

  They went around the house. Behind it was an area of almost two hundred and fifty acres completely covered with breeding yards. It was surprising to see how much work had been done in such a short time, although the flimsiness of the constructions was evident on close inspection. It was all provisional, Ema explained. They changed the arrangement of the fences every day, according to their needs. A quick overview of the great labyrinth: rows of cages raised a yard and a half off the ground, globes of woven wire with little paper compartments, individual cages with parasols, open yards with trenches and drinking troughs, and sheds of thatched palm for tending to the birds in various ways.

  “A glorious vision of industry!” exclaimed the colonel. He looked as if he were about to go on, but in the end all he said was: “Though perhaps a closer look will reveal the most glorious details.”

  First they came to the fence of a yard in which various birds were roaming free.

  “What are they?” asked Espina.

  “Female duskies.”

  “Duskies? Why are they called that?”

  “It’s the name of the breed. Didn’t you know?”

  The colonel was intrigued. He looked carefully at the pheasants, which were moving about in absolute silence. They were gray and looked faded. A very black down could be glimpsed beneath their feathers, hence the name. Ema explained that the breeders had worked long and hard to achieve that color.

  “Gray,” she said, “is the best, genetically.”

  She had bought breeding cocks of that variety in all shades of greenish- and bluish-black.

  “They absorb a particular range of the sun’s radiation,” she said, “because of the dark plumage. And that gives the flesh a special taste. It’s also why their eggs are red.”

  She pointed out the nests. From where they were standing they could see a magnificent scarlet egg.

  “Why is it so hard for them to walk?”

  “We inseminate them every day. I guess they’re pretty sore.”

  Closer observation revealed that the pheasants could barely move: their legs were painfully twisted and their necks were stiff. The silence that had impressed Espina was an effect of grave debility, not elegance.

  “Isn’t it bad for them?”

  “I don’t think so. The egg-laying lasts a month; they’ll survive. They have the rest of the year to recover. We keep them awake at night, and they lay two eggs a day without fail. That makes six hundred fertilized eggs, just for this variety.”

  The colonel looked up but said nothing.

  They visited other yards, where the spectacle was similar. Ema explained as they went. There were a dozen hens of each color, walking unsteadily (but constantly), and almost all in a torpid state on the far side of pain.

  “They don’t look like pheasants,” said the colonel.

  Ema laughed: “Their sexual dimorphism is very marked. You’ll recognize the males, when you see them. The females don’t have the crest or the tail.”

  “They look like chickens.”

  They stopped in front of the yard where the Lady Amherst birds were kept: they were small creatures, fragile like porcelain, and their beaks, drained of calcium by laying two eggs a day, were translucent.

  “We’ve had to give them stimulants to keep them moving.”

  “I was wondering why they bother to walk.”

  They had little feathers, like partridges. Mainly white, with the odd red, blue or yellow feather here and there, which gave them a messy appearance. Had they not seemed so moribund, the effect would have been comic.

  “I like them anyhow,” said the colonel.

  “Their flesh is very highly prized.”

  They continued on their way. Espina stopped with an admiring exclamation in front of an elaborate semicircle of individual cages, each containing a nest on which a plump golden pheasant was sitting, too tired to lift an eyelid.

  “We had to isolate them. They’re cannibals.”

  “They look like they’re about to die.”

  “They get exhausted. But they’ll survive.”

  “I’d be sorry if they didn’t. Each one is a work of art, a jewel.”

  Their uniform golden plumage shone softly in the afternoon light.

  “Wait till you see the males.”

  “Where is the famous Satellite?”

  “You’ll see him soon.”

  “Is all the insemination done artificially?” the colonel asked.

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. Since we’re dealing with birds and species developed in vitro, everything is artificial. But yes, we do the insemination manually. It’s the only way to be sure, given their unpredictable impulses and the asymmetrical positioning of the cloaca. It would be absurd to let nature take its course with such unnatural creatures.”

  “I didn’t think of nature for a moment when I was looking at those hens.”

  “Would you like to see how we do it?”

  “Of course.”

  Ema took him to one of the sheds: a roof of palm-thatch supported by live banana palms. There were long tables, with cages, and instruments, and a number of Indians at work, seated on high benches. Ema and Espina approached the closest worker.

  “The colonel,” said Ema, “is curious to see the procedure.”

  “Why, of course. No trouble at all. As it happens, I was about to extract a few drops from this bird.”

  The Indian pointed to the cage beside him. Cramped inside was a superb Mongolian cock, whistling as he breathed. The colonel examined him. The bird’s breast muscles bulged under the dark down. His eyes were hidden by a stiff crest.

  “The first thing we do,” the young man explained, “is to give them a sedative pill. I gave him one a while ago and I’ve been waiting for it to take effect. Let’s see.”

  He inserted a pencil between the bars of the cage and poked the pheasant’s neck. The bird just looked at him stupidly.

  “Looks like he’s out of action.” He opened the cage and took him out. “Come on, we’re only going to sully your honor, ha ha.”

  The pheasant offered no resistance. The Indian turned him over and parted the down, revealing a round testicle.

  “How about that? Full already. We empty it every day at this time.”

  “You extract the semen every day?” asked Espina.

  “We do. Purebred pheasants are very sensual creatures. Their livers have evolved to speed up sperm production. Now you’ll see how easy it is to extract.”

  He inserted a very fine rubber tube into the incision at the base of the testicle and slowly pushed it in half an inch.

  “Done. It will pump itself out now.”

  And, indeed, the tube began to fill with a white liquid, which flowed in pulses, and dripped into a transparent sphere the size of a die. It kept coming for a minute. Then the young man tugged the tube free and put the pheasant back in his cage. The bird’s eyes had rolled back and his head was hanging limp as a rag.

  “He looks dead,” the colonel observed.

  “Don’t worry. It’s the same every da
y. In a couple of hours he’ll be up and about.” The young man raised the sphere and examined it against the light. “Top quality. This would be enough to fertilize two thousand eggs, if we had enough hens. For the moment, all we do is divide it into drops, which is much simpler.”

  He opened a bottle and tipped little globules of sugar onto a tray, transferred the semen into a fine, curved dropper and put a drop on each globule until there was no liquid left. Then he counted the globules he had impregnated.

  “Forty. That’s a good stock. These little balls stop working after two days.”

  He put them into a bottle, which he sealed hermetically and labeled with a code.

  “How do you use those beads?” asked the colonel. “I thought you worked with liquid.”

  “No,” said Ema. “The liquid is very hard to handle. Come and see. They’re inseminating some hens over there.”

  They approached another table. Working with the hens was much more difficult and spectacular, since they couldn’t be drugged: the drop in blood pressure caused by the sedatives would have prevented fertilization. Four Indian men were handling eared and silver pheasants. In contrast to their docile husbands, the hens were struggling and pecking. The handlers were performing their task efficiently, but the marks on their arms bore witness to the fierce resistance of their patients. They had to use their bare hands; gloves would have hindered the delicate manipulation.

  They gathered round an Indian who was opening the cage of a silverish hen. Ignoring the shrieks and flapping, he tipped her over and placed her on the side of the table, with her head hanging over the edge. Her claws were opening and closing furiously.

  “Hot for it, like a budgerigar,” said the Indian, laughing.

  He put his fingers on the cloaca to part the down. With great skill, he opened the vagina slightly and pointed to the uterus.

  “Here’s the oviduct.”

  It was a gristly white tube. He turned it inside out like a glove, revealing the Graafian follicles, which were continually giving off little ovules. It looked like the underside of a mushroom, pink and moist. To judge from the squirming, that part of the hen’s anatomy was not designed to withstand exposure to the atmosphere. The worker proceeded more quickly now. With a pair of tweezers he deposited one of the globules between the gills; they saw it dissolve in a matter of seconds.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  He turned the oviduct back the right way and let the vagina clap shut, then righted the pheasant. Her eyes were bloodshot and her beak was trembling. She could no longer cry out and kept falling over in the cage.

  The whole operation had lasted no more than a minute. Espina was pale and his knees were shaking.

  “You don’t think it’s too cruel?” he said to Ema as they moved away.

  “Everything is cruel,” she said. “But what does it matter? It’s hard to come to terms with animals. Let’s go. I fear you didn’t find our little workshop amusing.”

  “There was something wretched about that hen . . .”

  She took him by the arm, and they left the shed. The colonel was bathed in a cold sweat. They walked between yards and washing troughs, heading for the big pens situated on the hill, near the edge of the forest. Once the fresh air had restored Espina’s composure, they resumed their conversation.

  “How many chicks will you get altogether?”

  “By the last day of the laying season, we’ll have five thousand fertilized eggs.”

  “And you’re planning to release two thousand? I can’t see why. Wouldn’t it be better to keep them all here, under control?”

  “I thought you didn’t like our system.”

  “Well, it’s efficient, I give you that.”

  “My aim is to have forty thousand free-ranging pheasants. Starting with two thousand this spring.”

  “Why forty thousand?”

  “It’s a critical number. A population of that size creates what the pheasant breeders call a ‘stupid ecology.’ Then there will be no need for the manipulations that you found so wicked. What you saw is just the prehistory of the breeding program.”

  “And how long will it take you to reach that goal?”

  “Four years. Maybe five.”

  “All those birds. You don’t think it’s too many?”

  “Any less and it won’t work. With that number there will be a natural world of pheasants. Which will have a double effect: they’ll cost us nothing, while for the buyers, they’ll be exorbitantly expensive, like resources from some faraway place . . . Like moon rocks, for example.”

  Ema paused a moment to allow the colonel to digest this premise. Then she continued: “By that stage my property will be an ecosystem, like the Indian breeding-grounds, which are sources of infinite wealth, but so close to wealth itself that they become invisible, and give their owners the illusion that they are extremely poor, the poorest beings in the universe. You’ll see.”

  They had reached the houses where the male pheasants lived, in strict separation. The architectural imagination of the young builders had surpassed itself with each new construction. Most were composed of a cigar-shaped minaret, leaning slightly to the west, and the pheasant house proper, of irregular shape, partly sunk into the ground. They were surrounded by loose laceworks of black wire. The remains of torn-apart birds and mice could be seen in front of the dark doorways.

  “We feed them live prey,” said Ema.

  “But where are they?”

  “They’re very discreet. They don’t like to be seen, especially if they suspect that they’re serving as entertainment. But I think you’ll be able to see a few. There’s an Egyptian eating over there.”

  A male royal pheasant moving freely in the open is an unforgettable sight because of the disproportionate tail, as long as a sword, and the inconceivably tiny head. Whatever its rank in the hierarchy of breeds and families, a pheasant is always, in some sense, an apparition.

  Espina watched the birds in silence. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he was oblivious to what his friend was saying. As they were passing a deserted ziggurat, an aggressive Colchian pheasant emerged from the opening. He walked up to the wire mesh and gave it a peck. A glossy creature, with deep red rectrices and a shining black bald patch. His eyes were protected by two flakes of dark mica.

  “We’ve had to give him blinders,” explained Ema. “The constant production of semen has weakened his retinas; the light hurts him.”

  “Now I’ve seen it all!” said Espina, laughing.

  “But you still haven’t seen our star . . .”

  “True, the famous Satellite! Where is he?”

  Ema led him up a path of blue slabs to a pheasant house away from the rest, at the top of the hill. Its tower was taller than the others and leaning dangerously; the retreat was sunk quite deeply into the earth; and the surrounding area, fenced off with strips of cloth, was scattered with dusty carrion. Espina didn’t see the bird at first, then mistook him for a rat. Satellite was tearing apart the rotten carcass of a starling. He justified expectations simply by being so strange. Contrasting sharply with the conventional image of the pheasant, he had no tail and his ribcage was so distended that it gave him the look of a hunchback. For a while, the colonel was lost for words.

  “But he’s not golden; he’s gray!”

  Ema laughed.

  “That’s what everyone says at first. Wait till he moves.”

  The bird shook himself, tugging at his prey. But it was only when he walked off unsteadily toward the drinking trough that the colonel realized: the color he had taken for gray was in fact the most secret shade of gold. Ema told him enthusiastically that Satellite’s production had inseminated all of her fifty golden hens. Very few breeders, even among minor royalty, had a cock pheasant of such prowess.

  The colonel stood at the fence for a long time staring at the bird.

 
; “Come on,” said Ema. “There’s more.”

  She took Espina to the closest windrow, beyond which a steep slope fell away. At the bottom, in a meander of the river, were square pools, divided into submerged yards, with platforms and walkways. Everything that was needed for bathing the pheasants.

  “The system,” Ema explained, “is copied from English sheep baths. Pheasants and sheep seem utterly different at first glance, but they have the same aversion to water and they use the same tricks to avoid getting wet.”

  Espina and she went halfway down the slope and sat on rocks. They were completely absorbed by the spectacle unfolding at the bottom of the amphitheater. Ten Indian boys were diving in and catching the pheasants in the water, savagely plunging them under, engaging in clumsy amphibian combat, and splashing about tumultuously.

  “But that’s crazy!” exclaimed the colonel, laughing. “They’ll kill them.”

  “Not at all,” said Ema in a dreamy tone of voice. “Look carefully.”

  Then Espina observed the game in silence . . . He felt as if he were gradually entering a dream or an otherworldly scene. The water made the workers and the struggling pheasants shine. The colonel felt a strange uneasiness growing within him, a disquiet, a sudden desire. This pheasant breeding was child’s play, a game without consequences. It scared him. It was sodomy incarnate. One false step could lead to annihilation.

  Espina was not so naive as to suppose that in one of the lives he might have led, he would have sat there gazing longingly at those naked kouroi. He knew that his personal Sodom was the sum of innumerable circumstances, which finally crystallized in the eternal instant at which his sex had been determined. But the same applied to reality itself: it was a scene produced by chance.