Cesar Aira - The Hare

Their first march took them to the spot where Coliqueo’s seasonal camp had been pitched. Coliqueo’s men were no longer there (a fact which the allies already knew: according to their information, his army had withdrawn some fifty leagues to the north) but they soon ran into a large raiding party which was hastening to cut off their advance. The first battle was fought under a blanket of dense white clouds and drizzle. The combat itself lasted barely three or four minutes. There were no more than a thousand enemy troops, but in the general confusion their own superior numbers seemed unimportant. The two forces became completely entangled: as soon as they saw each other on their respective horizons, they charged straight at one another. Both sides went clean through the enemy lines, and then scattered in every direction, fleeing but also fighting, caught up in extravagant chases that eventually formed one huge circle. The combat as such was over. The allies went to round up the cattle that had been scared off, then lit fires for dinner. A short while later, the Vorogas came to carry off their dead. The Huilliches buried their own in funeral ceremonies that same night. They committed the atrocity of skinning live horses to wrap the dead bodies in. Clarke was sure he would go on hearing the cries of those poor animals until Judgment Day. Everyone got stupendously drunk. The chiefs and the Englishman spent the night issuing and receiving messages. As baptisms of fire go, it had been passable. Gauna had stayed neutral, Carlos was unhurt and full of himself. Clarke had fired barely a dozen shots.

From that point on, Clarke began to understand something which reassured him completely with regard to simultaneity: it was subordinate to the narrative. It was this which gave it a structure, a perspective, made it comprehensible, and at the same time removed the terror of the moment from it. It confirmed the fact that it was unrepeatable, but made this acceptable. Deep down, it meant always contributing to the narrative, which became one long repetition. Although it seemed as if the Indians were caught up in the overwhelming present, they in fact relied on the goodwill of a narrator for their activity to exist in reality. The spectacle of the ducks convinced Clarke he was right. In order to see them, the idea had first to take shape in space, and this suddenly led the whole army to travel an incredible distance, without greatly changing the thoughtful calm that the movement emerged from. This was the Great Sine Curve of the Mapuche armies, a line that would have exploded the maps if anyone had tried to trace it. In his youth, Clarke had been an enthusiastic student of the campaigns led by Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and of course Napoleon, which he knew by heart. He attempted to put what he had learned into practice, knowing full well that things would turn out differently on the pampas. And so it proved. Not even ten Europes laid side by side would have been sufficient to contain the Great Sine Curve. It was a movement that embraced all other movements, past and future. Without even catching sight of the enemy, they struck terror into them, they surrounded them a thousand times, they cut off all their lines of retreat, even ones they would never have dreamt of using. Finally there came a moment when their army touched the absolute tangent, the sea. This was such a novelty that they halted there for a full day. For many of the Indians, this was the first time they had seen the sea, and they were left awestruck, fascinated, even though the thick mists robbed the sight of much of its grandeur. If it had not been raining, they would have gone for a swim. They did so anyway. Several of them drowned, carried away unsuspecting by the pull of the waves. As night was falling, a party of Indians who had been exploring the shore appeared at the generals’ bonfire and told them excitedly that something extraordinary was taking place on some nearby rocks. Clarke climbed on to Repetido and sent for Carlos, whom he felt obliged to show anything of interest. The youngster did not appear, but when Clarke arrived at the spot, he found him already among the crowd of spectators. They were all gathered at the top of some high cliffs, from the edge of which a small, inaccessible beach could be seen. On it were about a hundred grotesquely large ducks. Even allowing for the distance, they must have been at least five feet tall, like overgrown children. They were plump to the point of bursting, with snowy white down, huge blue eyes, and broad webbed feet that they planted firmly (they must have weighed at least one hundred and seventy-five pounds) into the wet sand. The first impression they gave was that they must be dwarves in disguise. But how on earth could a hundred dwarves be got together like that? And Clarke had never heard mention of any pygmy races on American soil.

“They’re not ducks,” said Maciel, who had ridden with him. “They’re seagulls, which are quite similar.”

“What about their bills then?”

“Well, they’re spoonbill gulls.”

Colqán, the aristocratic Tehuelche, burst out laughing. According to him, they were ducks all right, and not even particularly large ones; it was certain substances that the Indians had taken which made them see everything out of proportion. Clarke said nothing in reply, but he was convinced this was not the case. At any rate, even leaving aside the question of their size, the ducks were behaving in the most extraordinary fashion. They were walking very erect, like geese, with long, determined strides; even though there was no apparent pattern to their progress, there must have been a secret one. It was a shame it was so misty, because this meant he missed important details. The ducks were walking round and round. All of a sudden the onlookers could see an enormous white egg about the size of a feather bolster. It was obvious now that some kind of ritual was taking place. Although animals do of course perform rituals, and even highly complicated ones, this only increased the impression of artificiality. As soon as they saw the egg, the Indians stopped laughing and commenting. It was as if this colossal egg bewitched them even more than the sea had done. Clarke remembered some of the things Coliqueo had told him: the exact content of his ramblings was of little importance, it was enough to know that a duck’s egg had been part of his grand scheme of things. Coliqueo, who like every emperor overdid the medicinal herbs, had made it seem like a hallucination; but it was in fact real, and Colqán was wrong.

The mysterious palmipeds, surrounded not only by mist but by the encroaching dark gray of a rainy dusk, gave little ceremonial kicks to the egg until it reached the sea, then dived in after it one by one. Defying the high waves, the sinister rumble of the tide, and the wind and rain, they performed stately circles around the egg, which floated in the center.

“It must be rotten, if it floats,” Maciel said.

“What do you know about it?” another chief responded.

They left the scene lost in thought. They could have shot duck after duck (or at least the Englishman could have done so, and the few Indians who were good shots but never killed anyone because they never normally bothered to take aim, firing at random) but they would never have been able to recover their catch.

The second battle took place out of sight and sound for the naturalist and makeshift general, who learned about it only afterward, and elsewhere. The Great Sine Curve had disconcerted everyone, friend and foe alike. Half of their troops, previously grouped at Salinas Grandes, joined the Figure at an odd angle, and immediately ran into the Voroga forces. No one was killed, something so unusual that it led Clarke to think it had been nothing more than a skirmish. The person who described the action was a show-off from the Court who had become a messenger to see a bit of the world. He made a great show of standing on ceremony to utter complete banalities, lent himself airs, and prolonged his sentences interminably. In the end, he gave the impression he had no idea of what he was talking about, and that he was talking about nothing. And yet he said it with complete assurance, was totally convinced and convincing. Clarke’s mind wandered as he listened to this babble. Something had occurred to him, and he preferred to follow the thread of his own thought than the Indian’s grandiloquence, to which however the other chiefs in the war council were listening with rapt attention.