Cesar Aira - The Hare

One other thing disturbed the Englishman, and that was the readiness with which the Indians executed spies. They went too far. Even the slightest suspicion led to yet another throat-slitting. The last straw was when they summarily sentenced to death a poor Indian caught some distance from the camp carrying nothing more suspicious than a sack of dahlia bulbs. Clarke made it his personal responsibility to get him pardoned. It was pretty obvious that the fellow was no spy or anything of the kind. But the savages around the leaders’ fire insisted on cutting his throat. Although their reasons for doing so were nonexistent, when challenged they invented some. One of them came up with the idea that the bulbs were a coded message based on how many of them there were, their size, and even the bits of dirt they had on them (he could not prove any of this, because both bag and contents had been stolen). Another chief suggested it might be a delayed-action message: when the dahlias bloomed, the enemy might read its meaning in their colors. Clarke replied that was the most absurd idea he had ever heard. It made no difference. He fell back on an argument which he considered of central importance: saving a life with a view to the future. The Indians laughed wholeheartedly at this. They told him it was like prohibiting an Englishman from taking tea in order to save the parliamentary system. The argument was complicated still further by a spurious discussion as to whether it was more correct to use the word “bulb” (in Mapuche) or “tuber,” which was more graphic. However ridiculous it might seem, they spent three hours of byzantine discussion going over and over this point. In the end, they cut the poor unfortunate’s throat.

“Are you happy now, are you satisfied?” Clarke asked them angrily.

Yes. They were delighted. They even had the gall to add: “We discovered something interesting: bulb smuggling carries the death penalty.”

At this, they all started to laugh, even Maciel, who until then had been the only one to take Clarke’s side, not because he was convinced but rather out of a fantasy of friendship. Curiously, Clarke quickly got over the incident; at other times in his life he would have left, slamming the door behind him. There might have been several reasons for him not doing so on this occasion, but perhaps the main one was that there was no door to slam, nor indeed any “outside” for him to exit to. This made a great difference. To a large extent, it was impossible to blame the Indians. Not because they were innocent or stupid, but simply due to this lack of an inside or outside for his not inconsiderable intelligence to latch onto.

Due to the urgency of the situation and the prestige he enjoyed as a shaman and close friend of Cafulcurá, Mallén was the natural focal point for all the deliberations. These went on endlessly, largely because there was nothing else to do. But Mallén pushed Clarke to the fore with a constant stream of requests for advice. The Englishman adapted his counsel to what the Indians considered logical, but as he himself had a quite different logic, and as their pampa way of arguing was for him simply play-acting, something in him was plainly still au dessus de la mêlée , was ready, even if only in theory, to change opinion in an instant, to switch sides without the slightest reason; and this was precisely what the Indians most respected. Simultaneity brought the collapse of necessity. It was as though the narrative were being erased. All links between events were blown away. With the light of reason dimmed, all kinds of causal shifts took place, and they seemed to concentrate on one man, who was Clarke. An aura surrounded him. So much so that when after four days of waiting on the banks of the Rainy One the time was ripe for them to unite all their forces to crush Coliqueo, thanks to an almost silent decision, which seemed so natural there was no need to vote on it, the Englishman was invested with the rank and responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief of the allied armies of the Huilliche-Tehuelche confederation.

The entire war lasted no more than a week, and ended with a sweeping victory for the Huilliches. Yet another triumph in the career of the legendary Cafulcurá, this time undeserved, one that fell into his lap gratuitously, but proof of his genius anyway: he had after all been the motive, the reason, the excuse for the war, and everyone knows that in war the be-all and end-all of strategy is to become invisible. According to rough estimates, subject of course to immense variations, one hundred thousand warriors took part in the struggle. Nobody even thought of counting the dead, but there must have been a great many of them, as the whole point of the war was to kill each other. From start to finish, the weather was atrocious, truly English: rain, fog, not so much as a glimpse of the sun, cold winds which heralded or mimicked winter in the midst of autumn. It seemed as though everyone was in a hurry to get the whole thing over with, just so that the weather could return to normal. Haste became the chief characteristic of what came to be known in the collective memory as the War of the Hare. The reason for the name was soon lost in more or less bewildered suppositions by everyone except Clarke, for whom it had a very precise meaning: he in turn was dumbfounded as to how this meaning had somehow transferred itself from his subjective consciousness to a general acceptance. In fact, this was the least of the mysteries that went unanswered. Clarke got used to this being the case. He came to think he was up against the apotheosis of the simultaneity of nonsense. He was the center and driving force of everything that happened, but since the outcome inevitably took him by surprise, he ended up washing his hands of it all. He gave in to the tumult of the instant so naturally that it seemed he had been doing so throughout his life. From the outset, he rejected the classic position of the general who hovers high above the entire battlefield: he was no eagle, and anyway the pampa, with its complete lack of topographical features, did not lend itself to such a perspective. In itself it was pure terrain, a geometry: it would have been superfluous to deliberately treat it as such. Indeed, it would have been counterproductive, a waste. The armies maneuvered in a space whose gradients they themselves produced and instantly inverted. Everything was a question of creating lines, as quickly as possible; lines of arrival and departure, which magically intersected each other at every point rather than at any especially privileged one. It was like having to deal with the most eternal aspect of war, as a natural epiphenomenon of thought; to hasten life until it merged with death, and to keep this action concealed from the adversary. The key was to imagine the grandeur of destiny infinitely compressed until it was the size and shape of a rock crystal; the large and the small, the distant and the near, necessity and freedom. Quite how Clarke succeeded in doing this, to see clearly where anybody else would have got lost a thousand times, could only be called a miracle. But not for him. He constructed his own system, adhered to the lines, the horizontals and verticals, to the poetry of destiny, and with cheerful insistence let things happen.

The first issue was the deployment of troops. Since no one wanted to take the initiative, Clarke called a war council. The different armies were drawn up a certain distance away. For them to deploy, it was necessary to actually move, rather than rely on the customary toing-and-froing of messages. Clarke’s colleagues on the war council did not like this idea: in their view, it was tempting fate for bodies, the physical matter of human beings, to take the place of immaterial messages. They were afraid of seeming ridiculous. The Englishman would hear nothing of this, and so of course they yielded to him. One of their good qualities was that once they decided on something, or had it decided for them, they launched into instant, tumultuous action. So it was that in the twinkling of an eye the huge mass of some ten thousand Indians and an equal number of cattle got on the move. And at a gallop. The rain also helped drive them on. There was something slippery about the whole affair: no one could avoid tumbling into it. They went too far in their use of grease, which helped keep off the wet. It was amazing how much fat they could get out of even the leanest cow they slaughtered. They stored it, with a touch of unconscious humor, in big tins of English tea: every Indian had one to keep his supply in. Adept at practical matters, it took them only two minutes and two hands to renew their covering from head to toe. Then they shone like the outside of a window on a rainy afternoon. They invited the white men to do the same for practical reasons. Carlos Alzaga Prior had no qualms about stripping off and smearing himself all over. Clarke flatly refused at first, but the sensation of his wet, heavy clothing on his body the whole time, and the sight on the second day of Gauna anointed and glistening like a savage, finally persuaded him to try. It suited him. With his dark coloring, his black hair that had grown out of all recognition during the expedition, and his stocky build, he looked like any other Indian once he was smothered in grease and sat naked on his horse. He even rather liked the idea: it lent an air of carnival or masked ball to the whole affair; like every commander-in-chief, he was keen to make things seem a little less serious than they were, just in case. He borrowed the grease, and kept his clothing folded and dry in his own tea chest, ready to resume his identity as an English naturalist at any moment. Carlos even began to take lessons in how to throw bolas, the Huilliches’ main weapon.