Cesar Aira: The Hare

Cafulcurá fell into a thoughtful silence. The clouds from the herbs he was smoking wafted thicker and thinner. Layers of the perfumed haze rose high into the roof of the tent, which apart from the two of them was occupied only by three sleeping women, three dogs, and an extraordinarily large hen. Clarke sat silent as well. For the first time in his life he was aware of a direct continuum between the topic of conversation and the words used to express it. As they interacted, their values were exchanged: the vertiginous speed Cafulcurá had referred to became instead the immense slowness of real time. This inversion only served to strengthen the continuum. At this hour of the afternoon, Clarke also felt somewhat drowsy, which meant he had to make an effort to concentrate. He was drinking cold tea. The Indian chief was drinking water, or something resembling it. It was relatively cool in the tent, despite the torrid heat outside.

“I was just thinking,” Cafulcurá said all of a sudden, “of what you were telling me. Your brother-in-law is a genius, there’s no doubt of that. When I met him, I thought he was simply a likeable young man; but after what you’ve said, I’ll have to change my judgment. Nothing unusual in that. But I should say: he’s a genius in his own field. I myself have sought to convey similar ideas, but — and look what a strange case of transformation this is — I always did it by means of poetry. In matters like these, it’s important to win people’s belief. But in this particular case, it so happens that we Mapuche have no need to believe in anything, because we’ve always known that changes of this kind occur. It is sufficient for a breeze to blow a thousand leagues away for one species to be transformed into another. You may ask me how. We explain it, or at least I explain it. .”

He paused for a while to consider how he did explain it.

“. . it’s simply a matter of seeing everything that is visible, without exception. And then if, as is obvious, everything is connected to everything else, how could the homogeneous and the heterogeneous not also be linked?”

In the Huilliche tongue, these last two nouns had several meanings. Clarke could not immediately decide how they were being used on this occasion, and asked for an explanation. He knew what he was letting himself in for, because the Indians could be especially labyrinthine in these delicate issues of semantics: their idea of the continuum prevented them from giving clear and precise definitions. On this occasion, however, his sacrifice was not unrewarded, because Cafulcurá’s digression, starting from the sense of “right” and “left” that the two words also had, ended thus:

“We have a word for ‘government’ which signifies, in addition to a whole range of other things, a ‘path,’ but not just an ordinary path — the path that certain animals take when they leap in a zigzag fashion, if you follow me; although at the same time we ignore their deviations to the right and left, which due to a secondary effect of the trajectory end up of course not being deviations at all, but a particular kind of straight line.”

“Oh, yes?” said Clarke, who after first thinking with a start that the topic of the reason for his journey was finally being broached, soon found himself drifting off again. He was staring at the chieftain’s hair as the old man looked down at the ground, showing him the top of his head. It was the blackest hair Clarke had ever seen, glistening with bright blue tints. Not a single white strand. At his age, this was remarkable. He must dye it, the Englishman thought; the knowledge these Indians had of chemistry was more than sufficient for that; they knew so much in fact that it was odd that in this case the color they had achieved looked so artificial, so metallic. As he looked more closely though, he became convinced it was natural after all. There were many astounding things about this man, and this could well be yet another one.

“Every single change. .” Cafulcurá went on, drawling even more exaggeratedly as he returned to the theme of Darwinism, “even a change in the weather. .”

At that moment, the noise clearly audible for some minutes outside the tent became even louder; there was the sound of galloping horses (though this was nothing unusual, as the Indians rode on horseback even when they were only visiting their neighbor’s tent), then Gauna came in, apologizing.

Cafulcurá looked at him, a lost expression on his face.

“What’s happening?” Clarke asked him. His guide had turned out to be someone shrouded in mystery. As a guide, he left a lot to be desired. While Clarke waited for a definite excuse to regret having brought him, he had grown used to the idea of being constantly surprised by the gaucho.

“Everybody’s gone to see a hare that took off,” Gauna said.

“You don’t say!” Clarke looked across at the chieftain, who shrugged his shoulders in one of his typical gestures.

“Go and see if you like,” Cafulcurá said.

The Englishman did not need to be asked twice. He was stiff, bored and felt nauseous from the cold tea and the smell of herbs. Ever since their arrival forty-eight hours earlier, they had been moved around constantly. Although this was always done with the utmost politeness, it was beginning to get him down. The Indian elders apparently needed to hold private conversations about fifty times a day, which meant the strangers were asked to leave, and then moved from the new place allotted them half an hour later: always with humble apologies, but with that half-sarcastic fatalism that the Indians were so practiced in. They had assured Clarke that this was not normal, far from it. It was just that he had arrived at a bad moment. Now at least he had the satisfying opportunity to leave out of choice. Moreover, the reason in this case was intriguing. Taking an obvious precaution, he had been careful not to say a word about the hare, but he was afraid that, as so often happens in these matters, he had let it slip anyway, so that all the many interesting allusions to the animal he had heard were a kind of joke at his expense.

He left the tent heaving a sigh of relief. The light outside was devastating. Everything in Salinas Grandes was the harshest white. He had no need to ask Gauna in which direction the event was taking place, because several Indians were heading toward it at that very moment. He leapt on to Repetido. He could see where all the Indians were gathered, about two thousand yards away. The tents of the Mapuches’ imperial capital were arranged in loose semicircles that did not obscure the view on any side.

“Can a hare really fly?” Gauna asked him.

“Only if it’s thrown in the air,” he replied crossly. Gauna had an irritating way of asking questions, with a hint of malice in his voice. He must be half Indian, though his yellow, wrinkled face made him look more Chinese.

Their ponies covered the distance in no time. When they arrived, there were more children than adults present, and the latter were busy playing a game of hockey with a ball of rags. Clarke was taken aback. He caught sight of Mallén, one of Cafulcurá’s favorite shamans, sitting quietly on his horse away from the main group, staring down at his fingertips. He rode over to him, followed by Gauna.

“What’s all this about a hare?” Clarke asked him without preamble.

“I know as much as you do. I’ve just got here.”

Typical reply.

“I heard that a hare had taken off,” Clarke insisted.

“If that’s true,” replied Mallén, “it must have done so before I arrived.”

A small group of children close by them were staring up into the sky. Without saying another word to the shaman, Clarke went over to them and asked the same question. It seemed to him that the children were more polite, more rational — presumably because according to Indian standards, they were less so. They told him that yes, a little white hare (they used the same word for “white” as for “twin”) had taken off into the air, and they believed they had spotted it high in the sky. However, after the verb “taken off” they had used an extra word, the Mapuche enclitic ( i’n ), which served to emphasize the past tense. It could mean “a minute ago,” “a thousand years ago,” or “before.”