Cesar Aira - The Hare

Getting there proved no easy matter. Apart from the fact that all the emotions and riding had left him with his head spinning and feeling drowsy with exhaustion (he had got used to a siesta, and it was exactly that time of day), he had no idea where this oasis was. The previous afternoon he had simply followed Gauna. Now, on his own, every direction looked the same. Of course, in the absolute flatness of the salt pans, all he had to do was to discover which direction to take — then the shortest route was obvious. But, as happens with every line, there were tiny deviations, and these inevitably produced far-reaching effects. In reality, on this plain, any one point was always elusive. The brightness of the air, added to the horse’s painfully slow progress, also made it hard for him to calculate how long it was taking him, and in the end he felt completely disoriented. He decided to follow a broad curve, which despite being longer, was more reliable. It was not for nothing that the Indians had adopted it for their settlements.

Eventually, some children riding plump mares gave him the clue. Since his snail’s pace wanderings had taken a couple of hours, the heat was dying down by the time he saw the riverbank trees, and the bathers were already out of the water. He rode past the beach without dismounting, glancing at the lazy groups as he passed by. He was thinking that there were many things to envy in the Indians’ way of life. They confined themselves to the delicious task of being happy, doing nothing, and having a good time. They ate till they burst, slept like logs, played cards, and let the years slip by. They must know a secret.

He led his horse in among the willow osiers, dappled in the sunlight like giant green and yellow shards. The river followed its fanciful course, with quiet backwaters, deep pools where the water was darker and its bed was covered with tall waving weeds, tiny waterfalls cascading over pebbles, an entire hydraulic system whose charms kept everyone entertained. Who could tell how far this linear labyrinth extended: and it seemed that there were Indians all along it, placed there like ornaments, their skin glistening with water, their black eyes half-closed as they followed the procession of the hours with snakelike patience.

Clarke had taken the same direction as the day before, riding upstream, which seemed to be the one people preferred. But he went a long way with no sign of the young painter. The groups of Indians began to get scarcer, apart from an occasional fisherman dozing to the sound of the birds. Clarke gave up hope of finding Prior in this direction. Perhaps he hadn’t even come to the stream. If he didn’t find him now, he would have to ask their hosts for help, although they seemed to have forgotten he even existed. There was also the possibility that the opposite was true, and that they were keeping Prior shut up somewhere.

Whatever the case, Clarke gave up the search. He found himself alone on a kind of grassy beach, surrounded by overhanging trees. He dismounted, removed Repetido’s saddle and led the horse into the water, making sure beforehand to take off his boots and trousers. The cool sensation of the current immediately gave him a feeling of calm. Repetido drank his fill, then stood quietly with the water halfway up his legs. Clarke was sorry he did not have a bucket to wash the animal with. He cupped his hands and splashed water onto the horse until it was completely wet. What he did have, in one of his fine red leather saddlebags, was a brush, and he set to work energetically. Clarke had always adored horses, and this one General Rosas had lent him was a fine beast. Serenity in a living being is always an admirable quality. He wondered what it was about horses that made everyone admire their beauty. Could it be merely habit? For someone who had never seen a horse, could it seem like a repugnant monster? He could not imagine such a person.

It was the empty hour of the afternoon. A bird sang above his head. The swishing of the brush and the murmur of the water round his feet dulled his senses: He could hear the cry of a lapwing in the distance. . the horse snorting, the monotonous chirrup of the crickets. .

When he had finished the grooming as well as he could without soap, Clarke sat on the bank to smoke a pipe. Repetido left the stream and began to browse on some weeds. Clarke thought how good it would have been to have a cup of coffee with his pipe. He tried for a while not to think of his problems, nor of the Indians at all. That the Indians had become part of his problem was nothing more than a stroke of bad luck. His chief concern was Nature, or should be anyway. Apart from a couple of fat Indian women who had appeared while he was washing the horse, had stared at him for a moment, then gone back to wherever they had come from, nobody passed by. Clarke wondered if he was at the far end of the Indians’ bathing area. As he thought about it, he became curious to see what lay beyond. Considered as a line of water that dissected the plain, the stream was a homogeneous whole, whose attractions were interchangeable, but moving along it, it changed without changing, in direct proportion to the distance traveled.

Clarke stood up and, just as he was, without shoes or trousers, walked on about a hundred yards. A different aspect of the stream and its banks presented itself to him, novel despite being vaguely predictable. It was a kind of reworking of the same elements: water, the riverbanks, trees, grass. Fascinated, he walked on further, in the midst of complete silence. All the charm of the place lay in its linear aspect, the way each of its segments was hidden from the previous one: the very opposite of what happened out on the open plain. As he had thought, there was no one around. Even the distant sounds of voices and noises he had heard from time to time on the little beach no longer reached him. The river was a series of secret chambers, following on from each other as in an Italian palace. As he crossed a number of “thresholds,” the mechanism of increasing distance led Clarke to feel he was entering a world of mystery, a self-contained nothingness that invoked the infinite.

All of a sudden, he heard something: a quiet, stifled moan, a kind of private crying that was directed at no one in particular, but which had something of a call for help about it. It came from beyond him: to reach it, Clarke would have to cross into another invisible zone. He did so, and was transfixed with shock. All alone on the riverbank sat Carlos Alzaga Prior. He was weeping disconsolately, his head in his hands.

The sight came as a great surprise to the Englishman. He couldn’t recall ever having seen a man cry. It was true the watercolor painter was still almost a child, but there was something adult and definitive about his sobbing that touched Clarke deeply. He was confronting pain, and this brought out a feeling of nostalgia in him — although that was hardly a strong enough word to describe the mixture of anxiety and distress it caused him.

It was as if Clarke saw the youth cut out in a vacuum, in silhouette. Despair produces this kind of vacuum around one. Robbed of all points of reference, the figure could have been either near or far away: he could be a thousand leagues off, and be a giant, or only five inches away, and be a miniature. But he was only a few yards away, and Clarke had to trust to his eyesight, to the normal correlation of size and distance. This inevitability made the scene a cruel one. He thought he saw before him an emblem of his own life, and it terrified him. The terror came from being English, educated, reserved, from being unable to cry in public (or in private), from living inside a bubble and not allowing himself to feel any emotions. His emotional life had dried up years earlier — when in the first flush of his own youth, he had lost someone he loved who might have taught him how to cry. From that day on, he had never felt the sense of dread that is a natural part of life: he could see this now, when he was least expecting it, but in someone else.