Cesar Aira - The Hare

“There he is again,” he said to Carlos.

“I can see him, I can see him.”

“Is he coming or going?”

“That I couldn’t tell you!”

“Let’s see. . if he is moving from left to right, that means he’s traveling in the same direction as us; if it’s the opposite, then he’s bound to cross our path without our realizing it, so that we’ll see him on the other side, on any other side, because that depends on where we are at the time. . What a mess! We should draw up a timetable, plot our relative positions in black and white. It makes me afraid we’re lost. I think I’m going to have to have a serious talk with Gauna.” He lowered his voice as he said these last words, but fifty yards ahead of them the gaucho’s shoulders shrugged visibly.

In the meantime, the wanderer had vanished again, like a speck of dust drifting out of a sunbeam.

“Who can it be?” said Clarke.

“Some Indian or other.”

“Of course. But where is he going? What is he thinking? Isn’t it intriguing to ask oneself that kind of question?”

“All questions are intriguing, Clarke: if not, they wouldn’t be questions.”

“Do you know what it made me think of, a moment ago? Of Natural Man. There was a time when I read about nothing else. In the last century it was an intellectual fashion. . it still is, in fact.”

“Natural Man?”

“Yes. With a little philosophical effort, you can imagine the characteristics of a man stripped of all the prejudices of reason, culture, customs, and so on. It’s similar to building an automaton, but by taking bits away rather than adding them. In the end you’re left with the essence, the naked heart. .”

“But that’s very poetic!”

“And scientific as well. Getting to know distant and exotic peoples, like the Indians we see here, fills one with ideas about Natural Man. Or at least it does me, who lacks imagination.”

“But we are always creating people in our fantasies.”

“Rousseau, one of the inventors of the idea of Natural Man, says that the creation of one man by another is the most obvious sign of a failure of education.”

“In that case, he was the one with no education.”

“He did die mad.”

“Really? That often happens to philosophers.”

“That’s the way of the world.”

“Isn’t it rather repugnant to create monsters?”

“If you think about it properly, yes. But that takes us back to Natural Man by another route. From the outset, man is a kind of monster, an improbable conjunction of mind and body.”

“What about those Indians we were with the night before last? Would you say they were natural or artificial?”

“Both things.”

“But which side would you say they were closer to?”

“What would you say?”

“Natural, in spite of everything.”

Clarke suddenly remembered his responsibility — however fleeting and accidental — as the educator of a young mind. He thought of the inevitable failure. This led him along tracks that took him back into his own past, and his autobiography (as he knew better than anyone) bore a mysterious relation to Natural Man. He spent the hours and leagues until lunchtime pondering these thoughts, while beside him Carlos Alzaga Prior was equally wrapped up in himself. Shortly after their siesta, toward the end of the afternoon, they came across a flock of ostriches, and soon afterward met up with the men hunting them, who turned out to be from Coliqueo’s tribe. When these Indians heard that the white men were intending to visit them, they put on a show of great amazement at the (nonexistent) coincidence, and escorted them to their camp, forgetting all about the ostriches — who, to judge by the speed they were traveling, must by now have circled the globe.

“The duck’s egg is the most effective of all,” Coliqueo declared with an air of finality.

Clarke felt completely overwhelmed by the situation, out of place, struck dumb. The tent was full of women, children, dogs, and a fire where water was constantly being boiled for tea. Despite the fact that two of the leather sideflaps had been rolled up to allow air to circulate, the tent was still thick with smoke, so that Coliqueo and Clarke’s eyes were as pink as if they had been weeping profusely over the death of a loved one. And that in a sense was what Clarke had been doing, because he had sat vigil all afternoon over the dead body of Truth. Coliqueo was the prototype of the dishonest Indian, which might be comical at first, but became increasingly depressing as time went by. For his guest, that time had been and gone a long while since.

The way they had arrived at the duck was tortuous in the extreme, even though with hindsight it seemed not only direct, but even over-hasty. All the Indian’s lies and deliberate misleadings came together as if they were part of a deliberate stratagem. Of course there was no plan: Coliqueo did not have the brain for that. But on reflection, the twenty-four hours that the three white men had spent in his camp were nothing if not predictable. As he began to listen to the story of the duck’s egg, Clarke was at pains to go over in his mind what had happened up to that point. He did this quickly, but in a detailed fashion, because the secret of his fatalistic acceptance lay in the details. It did not matter that there was a gap in the conversation; there had been others before that, and with less reason; besides which common courtesy, to which he continued to pay tribute even among these savages, owed him this respite. His interlocutor could put up with a silence. In all fairness, it was the least he could do.

Coliqueo was a tall, thin, ungainly man, as black as an African, with the face of a Chinese gangster and flowing locks lightened by chamomile. He wore a filthy army uniform that revealed his skinny grease-covered frame (the Indians were so brutish that they used grease even when dressed in clothes). Like all the rest of them, Coliqueo drank; he had that animal, cruelly cunning streak that the Indians got from habitual drinking. Although he was supposed to come from the most blue-blooded Mapuche aristocracy, he had no manners whatsoever. Clarke was surprised to find himself put out that Coliqueo indulged only in the briefest of squints when he sat down to talk with him. After all, he told himself, what did it matter to him. The Duke and Duchess of Kent, whom he encountered in his own country, did not turn cross-eyed on formal occasions, and nobody thought any the worse of them for that.

The chaos and promiscuity of Coliqueo’s encampment were in stark contrast to the courtly disposition of Salinas Grandes. In fact, it was a provisional settlement, or rather a seasonal one, as in the winters these Indians took advantage of the hospitality of their white allies. Although they were totally influenced by the white man, they were no less Indian for it; on the contrary, some of their peculiarities were spectacularly exaggerated. They had chosen to spend the summer in an area of low hills, through which a narrow, treeless river ran.

The previous night, when the three white men had arrived, the Indians had been in the middle of a feast. They were celebrating the wedding feast of Coliqueo’s eldest son, a youth who atop a magnificent body had the same head as his father. Coliqueo was proud that his fifteen sons all looked like him. He made them line up in the bonfire light for Clarke to inspect: and it was true, they did all have his features, some more, some less. Some indeed had almost none; but here imagination and goodwill came into play, plus their progenitor’s assertion.

There were both drawbacks and advantages to arriving in the midst of an Indian feast as they had done; among the latter was the fact of being able to mingle almost unnoticed among the uproar and to observe without themselves being the object of unwanted attention. And the savages lent themselves almost excessively to observation, smothered in grease, turned into mirrors. They even performed a dance, in which the men came together, moved apart, formed circles, lines. They performed it as if against their will: holding themselves rigid, pretending to be clumsy, to be drunk, slow, or forgetful. In order to represent drunkenness, they drank like fish; the rest followed naturally. The women of the tribe meanwhile stood apart in their own disheveled group, screaming at the tops of their voices. Once the men’s dance had finished, they began to sing. A chorus of victims of the worst imaginable tortures could not have come out with a more terrible noise. Then after these attractions, everyone drank and screamed some more. They had all eaten unbelievable amounts of meat. Several cows, doubtless specially fattened for the occasion, had been slaughtered. The three white men stayed close to each other and refused as much as courtesy would allow, making their ribs of meat last as long as possible, merely wetting their lips in the mugs of liquor that were passed round. Even so, Carlos turned green and had to go and be sick; after that, he went from fire to fire and group to group, looking without much hope for Yñuy. Gauna, who on this occasion was very careful with his drink, fell in with some relatives of the chieftain, while Clarke had to put up with the latter’s ceaseless chatter until it was almost morning. He could never have recalled half of the senseless stories the Indian had told him. Coliqueo spoke incoherently, not so much due to the drink (which was to blame only for the general stupidity of his talk) but because he thought this made what he said sound more serious, more impressive. He did in fact possess a quite logical mind, but for some reason Clarke could not fathom, he believed that this quality was for second-rate people, or only to be used for domestic purposes. He created monstrous sentences, joining the subject of one with the predicate of another, in order to increase their vagueness. The Voroga dialect lent itself to contortions of this kind: indeed it seemed as though it had been specifically created for them. Eventually, the fires went out (they were fetid, made of dry manure) and in the vague daylight the Indians looked bleary-eyed and gloomy. So everyone went to sleep. On his and the others’ behalf, Clarke turned down the chieftain’s offer of his tent. He said they were accustomed to sleeping in the open air, and found it healthier. Since Gauna had asthma, and had suffered an attack during the feast, his little lie sounded convincing. The result however was that Clarke could not get a wink of sleep because of the daylight. Instead, in a state of indignant stupor, he went over Coliqueo’s endless nonsense in his mind. The Indian chief had not even asked him what his name was, or where he came from. He had spent the whole time talking, and about what? About what, good God? The worst of it was that he created the same sort of monsters from his topics as he did from his sentences. It was the method of a born liar: in that way, he did not even have to commit himself to his lies. And as for the other matter, the one which had brought Clarke to the camp, the tribe did not appear to be interested in war in the slightest, and their leader still less: but then, it was probably best not to put too much weight on the previous night’s impressions. Carlos was sleeping on his gear, his mouth wide open. Gauna had gone off on his own to join some other white men he had met among the Vorogas, one of whom he knew from before. Clarke had shared no more than a few words with them, but promised himself he would sound them out during the day, if Gauna had not already done so in private.