Cesar Aira: The Hare

Here Clarke paused for a moment. Somewhere in his unconscious mind he must have realized that this was the exact point where he had broken off his story before. He began again in a different tone, with a low, troubled voice that lent an air of truth to his strange and horrible account of how the episode had ended:

“To the uninformed, the glacier looked like a massive, threatening mountain of black ice. The fact that it moved added a supernatural touch. It was something to gaze on from afar, then get away from, to talk about at a safe distance. The Professor on the other hand had spent weeks ‘inside’ this wonder of nature. Not that he had gone into the ice, of course, but he had got inside the system of its formation, its movement; he had weighed it up, listened to its heartbeat, had ‘ridden’ it at length. Together with his Indians, now dead, and with the deplorable Callango, still unfortunately alive, he had clambered up to its highest point to hang his plumblines and set up his metronomes. Wearing thick felt overshoes they had spent hours up on the crest of the glacier, measuring the speed at which the wall of ice moved forward. The Professor had grown used to considering this dreadful object as a living being, and that was what motivated him that evening. He needed to calm his anxiety with a scientific image, even though he was the one who had supplied all the science. There was a slight mishap: I would not remember it, had not everything that happened that day been branded in my memory. The Professor lost his way. As it turned out, this was unimportant, because the tragedy had already happened without our being aware of it. For a few minutes we walked along aimlessly, with the Professor wondering what had become of the glacier, and me behind him, my mind a complete blank. Then I reacted and started to guide him. We could hardly see a thing, not because it was so late, but because a dense black cloud was descending upon us, with the noise of an approaching storm. A hurricane began to blow, producing a terrible howling as it whistled off the peaks. It was going to pour with rain at any moment, but that was the least of our worries. Finally we came out from the trees into the clearing made by the thrust of the glacier’s ice and rocks. Its dark mass rose in front of us. We did not look up at it, but were only too aware of the way darkness emanated from the glacier, and its monumental indifference; we could hear new terrifying sounds that the wind was drawing from its jagged needles, and a deep resonance from sonorous depths. At that moment something happened which you may very occasionally have seen during a stormy nightfall. The sun, which seemed to have set at least an hour earlier, was in fact still sinking toward the horizon. And in the lowest part of the sky there was a border more or less free of clouds. So that although the leaden ocean hanging over our heads neither moved nor lifted in any way, all of a sudden a shaft of light appeared, dazzling and theatrical, both bright and gentle at the same time, and a ray of sun found its way through the labyrinths of the mountains and shrieking winds and struck the glacier, illuminating it like a diamond against a background almost uniformly black. . It was then we saw her. We saw her the entire time, no more than a minute, that this fantastic sunbeam lasted, and I have continued to see her every day since then, like an epiphenomenon of light, any light. Rossanna’s white, naked body was encrusted in the glacier about two yards below the top, that’s to say about a hundred feet above the ground. To our confused, exhausted minds it seemed simply like some kind of ghastly miracle that defied explanation. Nevertheless, I thought I understood what had happened. The deranged Callango had thought up this macabre proof of his love. Demonstrating a skill that could seem remarkable, and indeed was, in the way that feats of madness are remarkable, he had lowered himself on ropes from the top of the glacier, had dug a hole in the ice, had put Rossanna’s body in it, and then had filled it with water which, at those temperatures, had frozen in minutes. For years now I’ve thought about it. I suppose he must have reasoned: if she is not to be mine, she won’t be anybody else’s, she will be part of this huge diamond, frozen, intact for all eternity. . He had often carried out similar tasks, with ropes, pickaxes, and buckets of water, for the Professor, so we could hardly be surprised that he knew how to do it. The light began to fade, the sun was going down, this time finally (and this adverb, in a broad sense, also applied to the feelings of my heart); grasping fingers of darkness stole the apparition from our sight. The Professor cried out and pointed: from the summit of the glacier, a confused outline of gray on black, Callango was sliding down, a bundle of ropes under his arm. He had spotted us, and was trying to escape. I raised my rifle, which I had been clutching for hours forgotten in my hand, and fired off a shot, almost without taking aim. I have to tell you that I did it as an automatic gesture, with no hope of succeeding, because not only were we four hundred yards from the target, but I was a dreadful shot, so bad in fact (I had never once hit what I was aiming for) that I had more than once wondered whether I did not suffer from some psychic resistance to shooting. But it so happened that hardly had the shot rung out before the ape-like silhouette of the black man came to a halt, hesitated for a moment, then plunged over the edge of the wall of ice. I thought I heard, with a certain melancholy satisfaction, the thump of the body as it crashed to the ground. In parenthesis, I should say that ever since then I’ve been a crack shot. I don’t think I’ve wasted a bullet in fifteen years. Well, such are the mysteries of the human soul. Night had fallen, and the delayed storm finally broke. A hard rain began to fall, lashing down in squalls of wind, while the sky was crisscrossed with lightning. One of the flashes lit the Professor’s face. I had not been thinking of him for a few minutes, but now I saw the mask of a man plunging into the abyss. I took him by the shoulders and dragged him toward the wood, where I hoped to find shelter. This was not to be; rather, the danger was still more deadly there. The branches of the myrtles were being whipped around, and the whole wood seemed to be on the point of being uprooted, to topple and bury us. As we ran out again, we saw lofty pine trees being torn from the earth, great clumps of snow being hurled from mountain to mountain, and the waters of the lake surging up in roaring black waves, one of which engulfed us and knocked us flat. . We ran on again, crazy, desperate; vague ideas flitted through my mind, offering me a remote hope: we could wait till morning, go and fetch Rossanna’s body, give her a proper burial, weep over her, anything. But even these plans were swept away in an apotheosis of horror: a fresh catastrophe befell us, in which the elements themselves seemed to be conspiring. First there was a peal of thunder, unbelievably louder than all the ones which had preceded it; then a lightning bolt fell to earth with a loud boom. We looked toward the spot. Our blind flight had taken us to a place from where we could see everything: the lightning struck the heart of the glacier, which shattered with a cosmic crash of breaking glass. Thousands of tons of ice collapsed on top of each other. I could think only of Rossanna. The Professor was a rag doll beside me, unable to take more than a few feeble steps. I don’t remember much more about that terrible night. I know we ran on again, unable to find shelter, that we somehow survived the following day of rain and winds, and that we ended up in the leather tents of some Indians who had picked us up just as we were about to succumb to the cold and exhaustion. We recovered, in our bodies at least, and started on a long, hazardous journey that eventually took us to Buenos Aires, and from there in a schooner to Southampton. The Professor had not regained the use of his speech, or all his mental faculties, and he died in my arms a few months later in his house in Surrey. As for my life. . well, it could be said it went on. I studied, I became a naturalist. . ”