Cesar Aira - The Hare

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Carlos in a stage whisper.

“Do you think that’s wise?”

Riders were still coming and going inside and beyond the razed village. A number of terrified cows had strayed into the camp. There were loose horses everywhere, some of them lying prostrate, but where could theirs be? Clarke was prepared to mount any of them, provided they made their escape. He cocked his gun and led the way to where they had slept. Fortunately, they did not stumble onto any lingering combat. When they were halfway to the river, Gauna appeared, leading two horses that were as unknown to them as the one he was riding.

“Mount up,” he said.

“Did you find Repetido?” was the Englishman’s first question.

“Don’t worry, he was the only one I looked for.”

And indeed there he was, with a faint phosphorescent glow to him, his flanks trembling. . together with ten other ponies at least as good as the ones they had lost. They were already loaded with their things, hurriedly girthed, but ready to leave nonetheless. Gauna had wasted no time, once he had spied the chance to get his own way and make off after the Widow. Clarke did not have the heart to reproach him for it. The best thing for all of them was to get away. He would make an exception, and leave without saying goodbye. They rounded up their troop without dismounting, and within a few seconds were fleeing across open country. When they looked back, the encampment was a mass of glowing smoke, crisscrossed by bullets, spears, and speeches. They said nothing, although they could all have admitted: “this time we escaped by the skin of our teeth”; but it was difficult to speak at full gallop. They soon lost sight of the scene of battle. A welcome silence greeted them. For two hours, they traveled through the night, lit only by a pale moon. Even as they fled, Clarke still felt time had no meaning, because he had witnessed a drama of simultaneity that seeped in everywhere. Might they not be fleeing before the massacre had started? If that were so, they would soon find themselves in the thick of it, killing and dying — though not necessarily in that order. However, the ride cleared the cobwebs from his mind. They changed once to fresh horses (Clarke leapt on to Repetido’s familiar back) so that they could continue for another couple of hours.

The moon traced a wide arc in the sky before disappearing behind increasingly dense mists. Above and below gradually became indistinguishable in the fog. It was only when they came to a halt that they realized how invisible everything had become. To go on would be suicide, because sooner or later one of the horses would fall into a gopher hole. And above all, they ran the risk of getting lost and heading back the way they had come. That was what decided them. They carried on a short while, more from inertia than anything else, and were surprised to find that they were on the bottom slopes of a range of hills. Some natural walls forced them to change direction, and there and then, they dismounted. They were so exhausted they scarcely had the strength to lay out their gear and wrap themselves in their ponchos. It was so damp, thought Clarke, that all his bones would he aching the next day. But there was no point in lighting a fire; because it was not cold. Nor had they eaten. So what? A leaden sleep forced his eyes shut.

When they awoke, the sun must have been high, even though it was still invisible behind the fog, and cast little more than a diffuse white glow in the center of a bluish-gray expanse remarkable above all for its immobility. An immobile world was one without light, even in full daytime. Clarke was awakened by Gauna repeatedly shaking his arm: and although he always prided himself on being instantly alert, this time he was sunk so deep in a mindless stupor, that he had no idea who he was, or what he was doing there. This was explained in part by what had recently happened to him, but also by what was happening to him now. They were surrounded by a number of upright figures, who loomed through the mist. There weren’t very many of them, although it took Clarke some time to realize this. He looked at Gauna, who as usual merely shrugged his shoulders. Clarke had sat on his saddle without being aware of it, and now searched for his boots. While he was pulling them on, his mind began to function. First of all in the past, reviewing the dreadful events of the previous night, then in the present. Naturally enough, he surmised that the present was a consequence of the immediate past, and that the strangers were, like them, fugitives from the disaster at Coliqueo’s camp. But he only had to draw closer to them to see this was not the case: there had been a kind of break in the night, and these were new people, the product of new circumstances, who were coming to greet him. Objectively, this was a relief. They were four pale little men, Indian-looking but smaller and whiter, who wore no paint or grease. They were dressed in bright colors, and seemed in fact a little overdressed for the season, wearing caps as well. Clarke bade them good-day, and they replied, without much of a smile but without being too curt either. He asked who they were, and it was only when they replied that he realized they did not speak the same language. He was momentarily perplexed. The Indian who spoke did so for perhaps three-quarters of a minute; as Clarke had not grasped his opening words, he lost all the rest as well. He turned for help toward Gauna, who was a good linguist. There he met another surprise. The gaucho had gone as white as a sheet, his eyes had turned up and a wheezing moan came from his gaping mouth. He was suffering an asthma attack, which must have been hours coming on, although in that case Clarke was surprised he had not lit a fire to burn his medicinal powders. He offered to do so for him now, but Gauna shook his head firmly and gestured as if to say: “carry on, carry on,” so Clarke turned back to face the Indians.

“Do you speak Voroga?” he asked.

“Of course. We are Vorogas,” the man who had spoken earlier replied. Clarke understood him perfectly. He suddenly realized he had understood before as well. They had said: “Good day to you, we trust we have not interrupted your sleep, but it was hard for us to contain our curiosity, because visitors here are so rare.” Why then had he imagined he had not understood? The logical explanation was to blame the difficulty he had felt waking up, but on reflection an illogical explanation was probably closer to the mark.

The ten languages in the Mapuche family, which Clarke had begun to study a decade and a half earlier, were distinguished from the other languages of the world by one essential feature: they were languages that were exquisitely deferential to foreigners, and not because their speakers chose to be, but because of their very structure, at least in their spoken form. When someone learns a foreign language, he inevitably commits all kinds of mistakes, even after lengthy study and frequent practice. Native speakers also make mistakes, except that they are not so much errors as the natural deformations that a prolonged automatic use of a language imperceptibly produces in such a delicate structure. Both kinds of distortion occurred in Mapuche, with the result that no one who began to speak one of their languages sounded like a beginner. Whether anyone else understood was another matter.

That other matter was also an interesting curiosity. Mistakes, bad habits, the stylizations of speech, all immediately appeared as a manifestation of art. Art may be understood in many different ways according to different cultures and ages, but these definitions all have one thing in common: art, the thing that is art, is that which does not demand understanding, since it is pure action whose meaning is a question of subjective choices. Formalities, intrinsic translations, were at the very heart of all the Mapuche languages. For this reason they had an old proverb which contained the key to all their behavior: “Do no more than talk.” Crossing their eyes, staring at the ground, were only a minor part of their meaning. The rest came from their words.