an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (8 page)

In terms of the physiognomy of combat, the best was still to come, at El Tambo. They sketched the battle from various points of view, for hours, until after midday. It was an uninterrupted parade of Indians, compensating for the brevity of their appearances by repeating them. Rugendas found himself making pluralist sketches. But wasn't that what he always did? Even when he drew one of the nineteen types of vegetation identified by the procedure, he was taking its reproduction into account, seeing it as part of a multitudinous species, which would go on making nature. Continually reappearing from the wings, the Indians were, in their way, making history.

The postures they adopted on horseback were beyond belief. This exhibitionism was part of a system for inspiring fear at a distance. There was something circus-like about it, with shooting instead of applause. They didn't care about the laws of gravity, or even whether the full value of their performance was being appreciated; the postures, it is true, had no value in themselves. Rugendas would have to rectify them on paper, to make them plausible in the context of a static composition. But in his sketches the rectification was incomplete, so traces of their real strangeness remained, archeological traces in a sense, because they were overlaid and obscured by speed.

Mounted squads emerged periodically from El Tambo—a complex of low buildings adjoined by extensive corrals—with all their firearms blazing, momentarily breaking the rings of savages, which reformed within seconds. The dairy cows had lain down; they looked like dark lumps. The dances of the Indian horsemen attained extremes of fantasy when it came to displaying their captives. This was a distinctive feature of the raids, almost a defining trait. Stealing women, as well as livestock, was what made it all worthwhile. In fact, it was an extremely rare occurrence, and functioned more as excuse and propitiatory myth. Unsuccessful as usual, the Indians at El Tambo displayed the captives they had not been able to take, with defiant and, again, extremely graphic gestures.

They came around the hill by the stream, a little group of them, lances raised, yelling: Huinca! Kill! Arrghh! The loudest, in the middle of the group, was triumphantly holding a "captive," perched sideways on the neck of his horse. Naturally this was not a captive at all, but another Indian, disguised as a woman; he was making effeminate gestures, but no one could have fallen for such a crude trick, and even the Indians seemed to be treating it as a joke.

Whether for fun or to make a symbolic point, they took it further. An Indian rode past comically cuddling a "captive" which was in fact a white calf. The soldiers intensified their fire, as if the taunts had enraged them, but perhaps that was not the reason. The next display took extravagance to the limit: the "captive" was an enormous salmon, pink and still wet from the river, slung across the horse's neck, clasped by a muscular Indian, who was shouting and laughing as if to say: "I'm taking this one for reproduction."

All these scenes were much more like pictures than reality. In pictures, the scenes can be thought out, invented, which means that they can surpass themselves in terms of strangeness, incoherence and madness. In reality, by contrast, they simply happen, without preliminary invention. There at El Tambo, they were happening, and yet it was as if they were inventing themselves, as if they were flowing from the udders of the black cows.

Had the artists been close to the action, it would have been impossible to transfer it to paper, even using some kind of shorthand. But distance made a picture of it all, by including everything: the Indians, the path by the stream, El Tambo, the soldiers, the cart track, the shots, the cries and the broader view of the valley, the mountains and the sky. They had to shrink everything down to a dot, and be ready to reduce it further still.

Within each circle there was a transitive, transparent cascade, from which the picture recomposed itself, as art. Tiny figures running around the landscape, in the sun. Of course, in the picture, they could be seen close up, although they were no bigger than grains of sand; the viewer could come as near as he liked, subject them to a microscopic scrutiny. And that would bring out the hidden strangeness: what would be called "surrealism" a hundred years later but was known, at the time, as "the physiognomy of nature"; in other words, the procedure.

The parade continued, at varying speeds. It seemed the riders would never tire. Suddenly all the soldiers came out at once and the Indians scattered, heading for the mountains. Taking advantage of the informal truce that ensued, our friends entered El Tambo, where a wake was being held. One of the dairy farmers had been killed by the Indians early that morning. The women had put his body back together. So there had been one casualty at least. The two Germans respectfully asked permission to draw the corpse. They reflected that it would not be easy to find the culprit, were anyone to try. Then they visited the labyrinthine stockyards and accepted an invitation to lunch. There was roast meat and nothing else, not even bread. "Roast Indian," said the soldier turning the spit, with a guffaw. But it was veal, very tender and cooked to perfection. They drank water, because there was a busy afternoon ahead. Since everyone else was retiring for the siesta, Krause was able to persuade Rugendas to rest for a while. They went and lay down on the banks of the stream.

Krause was intrigued. He had not expected his friend to bear up under the strain, yet he seemed willing to keep going, although not to show his face. He had eaten very little, barely lifting the hem of his lace mask away from his chin, and when his friend had diffidently asked if it was not awkward to eat like that, he had replied that the midday light would wound his eyes like a knife. It was the first time Krause had seen him so cautious, even on days of very bright light and after having ingested large quantities of analgesics. No doubt the circumstances were exceptional. Still it was odd for someone so fastidious to persist in wearing a grease-spattered mantilla.

Rugendas took some more powdered poppy extract, but remained awake behind the opaque black lace. As Krause was not sleepy either, they looked over their drawings and discussed them. There was certainly no shortage of material, but they were not so sure about its quality and the subsequent reconstruction. Both of them had been making these discrete sketches with the sole aim of composing stories, or scenes from stories. The scenes would be part of the larger story of the raid, which in turn was a very minor episode in the ongoing clash of civilizations. There is an analogy that, although far from perfect, may shed some light on this process of reconstruction. Imagine a brilliant police detective summarizing his investigations for the husband of the victim, the widower. Thanks to his subtle deductions he has been able to "reconstruct" how the murder was committed; he does not know the identity of the murderer, but he has managed to work out everything else with an almost magical precision, as if he had seen it happen. And his interlocutor, the widower, who is, in fact, the murderer, has to admit that the detective is a genius, because it really did happen exactly as he says; yet at the same time, although of course he actually saw it happen and is the only living eyewitness as well as the culprit, he cannot match what happened with what the policeman is telling him, not because there are errors, large or small, in the account, or details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction (even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection) that widower simply cannot see a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife.

Something else the Germans had to take into account, as they remarked in their conversation, was that the Indian was an Indian through and through, right down to minimal fragments, such as a toe, from which the whole Indian could be reconstructed, although they had a different example in mind: not a toe or a cell, but the pencil stroke on paper tracing the outline of a toe or a cell.

All this led Krause to a conclusion that was almost as bewildering as the story of the innocent assassin: compensation was alien to the Indians. In fact this conclusion derived from a thought that had often crossed his mind (and not only his): every physical defect, however minor or inevitable, even the gradual, imperceptible wear and tear of aging, requires a compensation, in the form of intelligence, wisdom, talent, practical or social skills, power, money, etc.

This was why Krause the dandy attached so much importance to his physical appearance, his elegance and his youth: they allowed him to dispense with everything else. And yet, as a civilized man, he could not escape from the compensatory system. Painting, his art of choice, was a way of complying with its minimal requirements. Requirements which, until that day, he had considered absolute; without a minimum of compensation it would be impossible to go on living. But that was before he had seen the Indians, and now he had to admit that they did not respect the minimum—on the contrary, as objects of painting, they made fun of it. The Indians had no need of compensation, and they could allow themselves to be perfectly coarse and unpleasant without feeling any obligation to be well-dressed and elegant to make up for it. What a revelation it was for him!

But no sooner had he said this than he remembered the state of his poor friends face (hidden though it was behind the mantilla) and began to worry about how Rugendas might interpret his disquisition.

Needless scruples, for his friend was plunged in the deepest of hallucinations: the non-interpretive kind. In a sense, Rugendas was the one who had taken non-compensation to the limit. But he did not know this, nor did it matter to him.

The proof of this achievement was that while conversing silently with his own altered state (of appearance and mind), he continued to see things and, whatever those thing were, they seemed to be endowed with "being." He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares
what
they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is
that
they are.

Some might say these altered states are not representative of the true self. So what? The thing was to make the most of them! At that moment, he was happy. Any drunk, to pursue the comparison, can vouch for that. But, for some reason, in order to be happier still (or unhappier still, which comes to the same thing, more or less) one has to do certain things that can only be done in a sober state. Such as making money (which more than any other activity requires a clear head) so as to go on purchasing elation. This is contradictory, paradoxical, intriguing, and may prove that the logic of compensation is not as straightforward as it seems.

Reality itself can reach a "non-compensatory" stage. Here it should be recalled that Mendoza is not in the tropics, not even by a stretch of the imagination. And Humboldt had developed his procedure in places like Maiquetia and Macuto ... in the midst of that peculiarly tropical sadness: night falling suddenly, without twilight, the sea washing back over Macuto again and again, futile and monotonous, the children always diving from the same rock ... And what for? What where they living for? So they could grow up to become ignorant primitives and, worse, deplorable human ruins by the time they reached maturity.

In the afternoon everything became stranger still. The action had shifted away from El Tambo, so the two Germans set off in search of more views, guided by noises and hearsay. If the San Rafael valley was a crystal palace, and the tributary valleys its wings and courtyards, the Indians were coming out of the closets, like poorly kept secrets. The scenes followed one another in a certain order, but their traces on paper suggested other orders, which, in turn, affected the original scenes. As for the landscape, it remained indifferent. The catastrophe simply came in on one side and went out on the other, changing nothing in between.

The Germans continued with their work. New impressions of the raid replaced the old ones. Over the course of the day, there was a progression—though it remained incomplete—towards unmediated knowledge. It is important to remember that their point of departure was a particularly laborious kind of mediation. Humboldt's procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature. Direct perception was eliminated by definition. And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness. This is something that happens in everyday life, after all. When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. And it seems impossible to ascertain those thoughts except by a long series of inferences. What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else's mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind.
Mutatis mutandis
, the same thing happens with a painter and the visible world. It was happening to Rugendas. What the world was saying was the world.

And now, as if to provide an objective complement, the world had suddenly given birth to the Indians. The noncompensatory mediators. Reality was becoming immediate, like a novel. The only thing missing was the notion of a consciousness aware not only of itself but of everything in the universe. Yet nothing was missing, for the paroxysm had begun.

The afternoon was not a repetition of the morning, not even in reverse. Repetition is always a matter of waiting, rather than the repeated event itself. But in the grip of the paroxysm, there was no waiting for anything. Things simply happened, and the afternoon turned out to be different from the morning, with its own adventures, discoveries and creations.