Cesar Aira - An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

For that reason, or perhaps because the Germans had been riding so quickly, they arrived almost at once. Beside a waterfall, on a broad platform of pink schist, the Indians were dining. They had built fires and were sitting in circles around them. Not a thousand of them. That had been an exaggeration. A hundred. The stolen cattle were in a small field nearby, surrounded by the horses to stop them from wandering. The Indians had butchered twenty for ribs and sirloins to roast, and had already begun to eat. To say that they were astonished to see the monstrous painter break into the circle of light would be an understatement. They did not believe their eyes. They could not. It was an all- male gathering: no women or children were present. Had they wanted to, whatever they might have said, the Indians could have taken the plunder back to their tents, a few hours' ride away. But they had decided to make a night of it: using the raid as an excuse, they had left their women waiting, worried and famished. Not that they needed to get away from the women to get drunk and go wild; they were capping off the foray with a binge, just to please themselves and to hell with the others. The drinking had begun with an aperitif, in the local manner. They swigged from the bottles they had managed to steal. Drunkenness and guilt fused into terror when they saw that moonlit face, that man who had become all face. They did not even notice what he was doing: all they could see was him. They would never have been able to guess why he was there. How could they know that there was such a thing as a procedure for the physiognomic representation of nature, a market hungry for exotic engravings, and so on? They did not even know that there was an art of painting, and although they possessed that art in some different, equivalent form, they could not establish the equivalence.

So Rugendas was able to enter the circle of firelight undisturbed, open his pad of good canson paper and go to work with charcoal and red chalk. Now he really was at close range and every detail was visible: big mouths with lips like squashed sausages, Chinese eyes, figure-eight noses, locks matted with grease, bull necks. He drew them in the blink of an eye. The paradoxical effect of the morphine had made him extra quick in his application of the procedure. He went from one face to another, one sheet to the next, like a lightning bolt striking a field. And the resulting psychic activity… A brief aside is apposite here: psychic activity is normally translated into facial expressions. In the case of Rugendas, whose facial nerves had been lacerated, the "representation commands" from the brain did not reach their destination; or rather they did, unfortunately, but scrambled by dozens of synaptic confusions. His face expressed things he did not mean to express, but no one realized, not even Rugendas, because he could not see himself. He could only see the faces of the Indians, which to him were horrible too, but all in the same way. His face was not like any other. It was like the things that no one ever sees, like the reproductive organs viewed from inside. Not exactly as they are — in that case they would be recognizable — but badly drawn.

The tongues of flame flickered higher, splashing the Indians with golden light, illuminating a detail here, another there, or plunging everything into a sudden wave of darkness, animating the absent gesture, endowing mindless stupor with a continuous activity. They had begun to eat, because they couldn't resist, but everything they did led them back to the center of the fable, where drunkenness was mounting. Following their foray, a painter had emerged from the night to reveal the delirious truth of the day's events. Owls began to moan deep in the woods and the terrified Indians were captured in swirls of blood and optical effects. In the dancing firelight, their features drifted free. And although they were gradually beginning to relax and crack rowdy jokes, their gazes kept converging on Rugendas: the heart, the face. He was the focal point of that waking nightmare, the realization of the terrifying possibility that had haunted the raid in its various manifestations over the years: physical contact, face to face. As for the painter, he was so absorbed in his work that he remained oblivious to the rest. In the depths of that savage night, intoxicated by drawing and opium, he was establishing contact as if it were simply another reflex. The procedure went on operating through him. Standing behind him, hidden in the shadows, the faithful Krause kept watch.

24th of November, 1995