The Hare

1: The Restorer of the Laws

Bathed in sweat, eyes rolling, the Restorer of the Laws leapt from his bed and stood swaying for a moment on the cold tiles, flapping his arms like a duck. He was barefoot and in his nightshirt. Two pristine white sheets, twisted and knotted by his contortions during the nightmare, were the only covering on the brass bed with leather thongs, itself the only piece of furniture in the small bedroom where he took his siestas. He picked up one of the sheets and mopped his soaking face and neck. His heart was still pounding from the memory of the horror, but the mists of his befuddled sleep were gradually lifting. He took one step, and then another, pressing his feet flat on the floor to enjoy its comforting coolness. He went over to the window and pushed back the curtain with his fingertip. The courtyard was deserted: palm trees, the sun beating down, silence. He walked back over to the cot but did not lie down again; after a moment’s thought, he sat on the floor with his legs out in front of him, his back straight. The chill of the tiles on his bare buttocks gave him a brief shock of pleasure. He lifted his knees to begin his abdominal exercises. He put his hands behind his head to make them harder work. At first he struggled a little, but soon the movement became automatic, rapid, gravity-defying, so that he had time to think. He did a hundred at a stretch, automatically counting them off in tens, while his mind raced. He reconstructed the nightmare in all its details, as though this were a self-imposed punishment. The sense of well-being produced by his physical exertions helped dissipate the terror of his memories. Or more exactly, rather than dissipating it, the gymnastics made it manageable, like another number he was counting off. He was not unaware of the general meaning of those phantoms which visited him at siesta time. They were the one, the two, the three, the four, the five, the six, the seven, the eight, the nine, the ten. How mistaken those illiterate scribblers were if they thought it was the shadow of his crimes that was being cast into his sleeping consciousness. That would be counting backward: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. The fact was, it was the complete opposite; and if his enemies made this kind of mistake, it was precisely because by definition opposition was the point from which everything was seen backward: what obsessed him were the crimes he had not committed, a feeling of remorse at not having reached the end of his count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He had been too soft, too conventional. They said he was a monster, but what he regretted was the fact that somewhere along the way he had missed the opportunity of truly becoming one. He was sorry he could not be his own opposition, so that he could build up a picture of himself from both sides, like a neatly executed piece of embroidery. One, two, three, four. . it was his imagination that had failed him, and without imagination there could never be true cruelty. Five, six, seven, eight. . his dreams were the reverse image of the cryptic accusations published against him in those Liberal rags, first El Crap, then Muera Rosas (what imbecilic names!). The world turned upside down. Nothing but literature. The key to his dreams was barely more than regret at life passing by. What he lacked was true inventive genius, poetic agility. Nine. . he recognized the fact and was sorry for it, in this somewhat brutally frank exchange he was having with himself. But where, where, where on earth could he discover the talent necessary to change the wild reversals of the Montevideo hacks into reality, into life, into something authentically Argentine? Ten. A hundred.

While the other man was writing out a page, Rosas downed half a liter of gin with cold water. A small glass per line, which seemed to him by no means excessive. It enthralled him to watch someone write. He considered it one of the few spectacles with an intrinsic worth, which demanded nothing of the spectator. Nothing, that is, beyond a little patience, which was a quality he possessed in abundance: so much indeed that he sometimes thought he had little room for anything else. He felt that the time taken for his oral intentions to be transformed into a properly constructed and well-written page of writing was brief in the extreme. That was why he was so insistent on its neatness. It might seem that nothing was happening, but he saw nothing less than a transferral between two people; in the study’s shadowy atmosphere, he could make out the faint outline of a phantom. Gestures always created a perspective, especially if they were the gestures of writing. The movement of arm, hand, eye, and pen was an intention blown up like a bladder filled with phantoms. Those phantoms were one person becoming another. He perceived all this through a shimmering haze, as if all the objects around him were coated in a sublime sheen. This was the effect of the drink in the stifling afternoon heat, but it was also part and parcel of the scene itself. He told people he had discovered that gin was the best defense against the heat; what he did not say was that in fact the heat did not trouble him. In truth, creating a pressing need for the illusion of cold when it was hot, or vice versa, could be a marvelously effective way of giving utterances reality; that must be why the human race, in its prototype of the English, spoke so meaningfully of the weather all the time. It was a world within a world, but instead of being theater this was serious, for real. Perhaps that was the meaning behind the drinks he poured himself: cold water for altering the temperature, gin for the sheen without which there could be no inclusions, or they could not be seen. It all came down to the transferral from one state to another, from one body to another, one possibility to another. Which was why, in the end, it was he and not somebody else who was the Restorer of the Laws, and was precisely that and nothing else. He was that because. . Why? No, the reason had slipped from his mind at the same lightning speed it had entered. He shrugged; mentally of course. The moment of understanding had flashed by before he could seize it. He stood as stiff as a mummy for an indefinite length of time, his mind empty. His only movement was to lift the glass to his lips. All at once, the secretary handed him the sheet of paper, a model of neatness. The other hand held out a pen, for him to sign with.

•

Once the day’s work — so slight as to be almost nonexistent — was over and done with, Rosas went to sit in the arbor and wait for Manuela to serve him his maté drink. He liked to spend this intimate, family time of day relaxed in thought. Paradoxically, to do this he left his mind a complete blank. Impossible as it might seem for someone with such a high opinion of his own brain, he achieved this with no difficulty. There were quite a few birds singing, and three or four dogs mingled with the children at play. Behind him, a semicircle of lemon trees purified the air; opposite him, a big osier willow whose branches sprouted directly from the ground seemed like a wild ikebana put there for his entertainment. The beaten earth under the bower had been rapidly sprinkled in his honor. Sometimes, his mind fixed on nothing, he could almost believe he was the only man on earth, the only truly living human being. There was not a breath of wind, but the heat was by no means intolerable. Ugly and pallid, Manuelita came and went from the kitchen, carefully carrying his drink. Her beloved papa only drank half a dozen matés in one of these sittings, so it was not worth setting up a stove outside. She stood waiting while he sucked up the liquid with a shocking noise. Rosas found his favorite daughter neither attractive nor intelligent; on the contrary, he thought her an idiot. An idiot and a snob: that was Manuelita. The worst thing about her was her irredeemable lack of naturalness. A puppet made of offal. “She’s one of my worst habits,” he would confide to his friends. He was bewitched by this girl, but had no idea why. There was a fundamental misunderstanding between them — that much he could see, but not an inch further. She was convinced her papa adored her. He wondered how on earth he had managed to sire her. Fortunately, there was always some doubt as to paternity. Maternity on the other hand is always beyond question. Whenever he looked at Manuelita, Rosas felt himself to be a woman, a mother. For several years now he had been toying with the idea of marrying her off to one of his fools, Eusebio. It was his secret plan, the scandalous delight of the impossible. But the real scandal lay in the fact that, as is well known, the impossible is the first thing to become reality. So that when one day he saw that the scribblers were attributing this very idea to him in their rags, his consternation knew no bounds. Naturally he had never breathed a word about it. Yet they not only wrote about the plan, but as usual accompanied their conjectures with drawings full of scrolls of words. Of course, as with all opposition, these brutes had only a limited number of clues to work from, they had to make and unmake their jigsaws from just a few pieces, which meant that it was not really so remarkable that they should come to the conclusion: Daughter-Fool. But even so, it was astonishing, as Rosas saw it: is it possible to penetrate someone else’s incongruity? One’s own or anyone else’s, it made no difference, as he saw it. Even the most outrageous fantasy created at both its extremes, that of excess and of lack, the incongruity on which daily life was based. Although it was possible of course that the Unitarians had latched onto his idea by the kind of allegory they were so fond of, the Restorer was “hunting” the fatherland using an idiot full of wind as his shotgun. At this point Rosas, who was never very good at orthography, got into a muddle; but that did not matter at all, since what was allegorical to them was real to him, which meant that the misunderstanding became cosmic, universal, a law of gravity. In fact, the idea had occurred to him one day when Eusebio had been close to death from being tortured too much with the bellows. It would have been perfect to have married them in articulo mortis, because that would have avoided all practical consequences while retaining the symbolic value of the marriage. Manuelita already had a widow’s face. “My widow,” Rosas would sometimes mutter in his daydreams, although none of those who heard him ever understood whether he was talking about Manuelita, the Heroine of the Nation, women in general, Eusebio, the fatherland, or himself.

His two final audiences that afternoon had been granted to an elderly black woman and to an Englishman. The black woman had come about a trifling matter, a crass personal tragedy, but Rosas made it a rule always to receive his beloved darkies and play Solomon for them — an attitude they welcomed with a gratitude bordering on adulation. Rosas had a theory that before long, Argentina would be a country of blacks. He might even see that day arrive, if he lived long enough. He therefore took pains to keep them in the foreground politically, as privileged subjects of the Law and Justice. This cost him little, while at the same time he could see the inevitability of misery and stupidity which made this black nation a fiction. Today’s black woman came accompanied by her two eldest daughters. She was a dreadful specimen, who although she must have been only forty years old, looked a worn-out sixty. She launched into her story with heartrending sobs and cries. The interview took place on the main porch of the house, which at that time of day afforded some shade. Foremost among the sadistic onlookers secretly rejoicing in the scene was Manuelita, all dressed up in scarlet ribbons and bows, feigning compassion. She was a hopeless actress, poor thing. Her complete lack of naturalness! The Restorer listened stony-faced, his gin glazing everything over as he sat in his sandalwood chair. Whichever way he looked at the problem, there was no answer: after thirty years of married life, the plaintiff’s husband had gone off with another woman. There was no solution. According to the black woman’s tearful account, once the man in question had committed incest with his elder and younger daughters, he felt there was nothing more to be gained from the marriage as far as sexual gratification was concerned. Anyone could understand that. From this point on, the abandoned wife’s argument degenerated into one long moan of complaint. The Man in the Marble Mask felt that when complaining reached such a pure, ecstatic state as this, it gave him a good opportunity to think. The reasoning did not move forward at all, and seemed as though it never would. What did she want him to do? Have the man castrated? That would be easy, all too easy. But she herself must have realized this would get her nowhere. Manuelita was shedding crocodile tears, the two daughters were busy studying her afternoon robe so they could copy it, while the black woman herself never took her eyes off the Solomon from Palermo, who meanwhile was lost in a reverie about how the female body deteriorates. This train of thought (which could be summed up by the question: what does a woman have to offer, once she has lost the obvious?) led him off down unexpected paths, until all at once an idea, as bright as the sun, came to him as to how the woman might keep her husband. An infallible, impeccable method that was simple to apply and yet was guaranteed success. It was odd she had not thought of it herself, but then if she had, it would have occurred to all women, including her rival, which meant it would no longer be effective. And it had occurred to him, precisely to the one person who by definition would never need to keep a man in his bed. Strangest of all was the fact that he could not tell the person involved of the solution he had found, but had to sit there silent and motionless. Not because he was afraid of seeming ridiculous (he was far beyond that) but because there was a kind of logical imperative of silence which came into play just when saying something might have been useful. He stared at the black woman, she stared back at him. . there was a momentary impasse, but once he had arranged a concession for her offal stall at the slaughterhouse, she calmed down completely. That was more than enough for her to leave contented. And her husband? He decided that was a lost cause. They had reached no conclusion about the matter. Or had they? He wondered whether the woman had been able to read his thoughts.

As for the Englishman, he appeared at the most agreeable moment of the afternoon. He was accompanied by his nation’s Consul, who was like one of the family. Rosas also received them on the porch, which had by now been cleared of all prying eyes and contained two extra seats. The newcomer looked to be aged around thirty-five, and was dark-skinned, with jet black hair. He did not look English, but Rosas had noticed that some Englishmen

could be like that, almost Indian-looking. Rosas himself looked more like the other kind of Englishman, fair-haired and ruddy-cheeked. At first he thought his guest was ugly, although he was fortunate enough to be small, like an oriental. But when he spoke, in a more than passable Spanish, he became almost attractive, in a serious, reserved kind of way. They exchanged small talk. Clarke, as the Englishman was called, was a brother-in-law of Darwin, who had sent the Restorer greetings. There followed more empty remarks about the weather, journeys, this and that. What Rosas sought to convey above all was the atmosphere of the place, the time of day, the domesticity of the scene, which he was sure made a strong political impact. By now, the homely circle was complete, and went spinning on above and beyond Manuela’s absurdities. Manuelita divided the whole of humanity into “cousins” and “gentlemen”; she could see no further than that. The Englishman spoke of his intention of traveling into the interior of Argentina once his preparations were completed. This information verged on the unnecessary, so they did not waste much time discussing it. Both of them considered they knew as much as they could about the other. The previous day, Rosas’s police had determined that Clarke was in fact the person he claimed to be, that the schooner he had landed in had sailed from Valparaiso, and that beneath the cloak of a naturalist and geographer in the service of the British empire there was nothing worthy of note. Of course, it would have been much more interesting if there had been, which meant there probably was. The police had their limits. Rosas deplored the fact that good manners prevented one from asking people straight out what they were really up to. A different sort of courtesy was needed, he thought.

“My friend,” he said, as if rousing himself, “allow me to show you some tricks I can perform on horseback, then you can tell me if horsemanship is as advanced in Great Britain.”

The Englishman nodded and settled back to watch. He was immediately startled to see Eusebio’s head appear in front of him. Eusebio was a dwarf little more than a yard high, almost half of which was accounted for by his huge head. He had come in response to a whistle the Restorer must have given at some point during his conversation or one of the pauses, but which the others had been unaware of. Eusebio must have been extraordinarily vigilant toward anything that concerned him, which is what made him a monster. Nor was there any need to repeat the name of the horse that the Restorer ordered him to bring: Repetido.

There followed a spectacle that the Restorer of the Laws rarely neglected to offer his European visitors. Repetido was a piebald of indeterminate race, neither Arab nor American; slender, with large hooves like a caricature cat, stiff-backed and with a small, featureless head. The two Englishmen turned their chairs to face the wide glacis that served as a track; the courtiers broke off their conversations to look on adoringly. Manuelita arranged her scarlet bows, the trace of an inane smile still on her face. She was convinced that exhibitions of this sort were customary in high society. The supreme horseman, First Centaur of the Confederation, galloped around in circles to warm up his mount, but did not need do this for long: Repetido pranced and bucked, then sped along like a tame streak of lightning. Rosas had narrow, tight buttocks, which made it seem as though he were never firmly seated on the horse. This made it all the more natural for him to lift his feet backward until his ankles were crossed over its rump. He kept the same position and increased his speed, then the next time he passed by lifted his feet high into the air, at the same time plunging his head between his hands, which he kept flat on the saddle, so that it looked as if he were falling from a tall building. The first round of applause rang out. The third time he rode past, his feet were level with the horse’s ears; at the fourth, his body was completely horizontal. After that, he swung right underneath his mount’s belly, rode standing up, stood on one foot, knelt down, knelt facing backward holding the reins with his feet, then with his teeth as he touched the soles of his boots with the palms of his hands. At first, Rosas carried out each of these feats with a virtuoso deliberateness on the darting Repetido, then gradually speeded up while his mount continued at full gallop, and concluded his display with a series of spectacular pirouettes that drew thunderous applause from the onlookers. There were two kinds of exercise in his performance: the easy ones that looked spectacular, and the difficult ones that did not. Rosas could impress with either, at no great cost to himself, depending on how knowledgeable his public was. But since Rosas had no way of knowing this beforehand, and since there was usually a mixed audience anyway, he had adopted a routine which included both kinds of tricks, performing the easy ones the hard way, and vice versa.

On their way back to Buenos Aires, the two guests let their horses set their own pace. They took the low road, enjoying the evening air as the English often do, saying little to each other; the silence of the empty fields allowed them to speak without raising their voices even though their mounts went different ways around the ruts in the track. They watched as a startled chaja bird scrambled away from them in panic, falling all over itself as it did so. Both of them simultaneously thought of the Restorer. Plump pigeons bent the branches of some terebinth trees almost down to the ground. No doubt they were settling for the night. To their left, the dun-colored river was as still as a lake; only where the water lapped against the edge of the green-tinged shoreline was there any sign of movement, and then only if one peered closely. Thoroughly familiar with this landscape, the Consul ceased to pay it any attention, and concentrated instead on political matters. This meant he was neglecting his guest, but that did not worry him unduly. He was one of the old school of diplomats who considered it no part of a consul’s duties to act as a guide for his fellow countrymen. He kept his courtesies to a strict minimum, and on this occasion felt he had more than done his duty with the visit to the country’s main attraction, the Dictator. Besides which, there were two further considerations: first, if it were true that Clarke intended to travel into the interior, he could obviously look after himself in Buenos Aires; and second, politics gave him a lot to think about: so much indeed that twenty-four hours a day were not enough. So the Consul became completely engrossed in his own thoughts. Clarke meanwhile let his horse pick its own way. Rather than staring at the land, he was looking up at the sky, which was a wash of purple, with broad streaks of blue and pink. It was still stiflingly hot, and the atmosphere was oppressively humid. The silence was crisscrossed by the whirring of insects. . When the Consul raised his eyes again he was intrigued by what Clarke was doing. He had let go of the reins and his hands were busy doing something at the level of his stomach. From behind, the Consul had no idea what this might be. He pushed his horse on, twisting to one side so that he could find out without seeming indiscreet. Clarke was concentrating so hard he did not even notice. He was holding a small metal box open in his left hand, and doing something inside it with his other hand. The Consul recognized the apparatus as a chromatograph. It was made up of rows of tiny metal rings, into which Clarke was inserting needles with a dexterity that spoke of long practice. The Consul moved no closer. More than a waste of time, the operation seemed to him sinister: it was like sticking pins into the soft colors of the sunset.

A few days later, with all his preparations for the journey to the interior completed, the naturalist made another trip out in this same direction, but this time he rode considerably further, to a village north of Buenos Aires where a well-known painter lived in seclusion. On this occasion, Clarke traveled alone. He set out in the early morning, enjoyed a solitary picnic mid-route at around eleven, took a siesta under a weeping willow on the riverbank, then continued unhurriedly on his way, at little more than a snail’s pace. Below a certain threshold of speed, he found it hard to direct the horse: he was unsure whether they were advancing or not. He wanted to find the painter awake, but knew that whatever allowances he made, he always underestimated the length of siesta that people slept in these tropical climes. There was no well-defined track, and nobody seemed to be about. Just once he met a cart driven by a black man dressed in a green livery as brilliant as a parrot’s plumage. A child of about four or five ran in front, shooing off the pigeons that settled in the path the cart was inching its way along. The draught animals were a spectacle in their own right: twin white oxen, which had been so badly castrated that with the passage of time (they looked to be hundreds of years old), they had taken on the appearance of Japanese bulls, with swollen dewlaps and so many folds of white skin dangling from their backs that they appeared to be covered in sheets of marble, like Bernini statues in Rome. The two men greeted each other with great courtesy as they passed. At the time, it seemed to Clarke that the black man was wearing a pair of eyeglasses, but afterward he was not sure he had seen correctly. A little further on, where the riverbank became steeper, he saw a group of creatures which from a distance he took to be crabs, but which turned out to be hedgehogs lying uncurled in the sunshine. A curious thing happened. The hedgehogs, which are the most timid creatures imaginable, saw him at the very moment he caught sight of them, but instead of reacting as a group, they did so one by one, and though this was a very rapid process, Clarke was able to see how each of them took flight. Not that it could really be called a flight: hedgehogs move extremely slowly, but if frightened, they do contrive to disappear somehow or other. As Clarke watched, each of them rolled up into a ball, and this meant they all began to roll down the riverbank and into the water. One after the other, until there was not a single animal left, before the Englishman had so much as dared to blink.

Prilidiano’s siesta was shorter than usual that afternoon, but it was not without its disturbing phantoms, which was normal, far too normal. It was pure habit, as with children. And this man, so important for Argentine history in his century, had a great deal of the child about him. He was plump, impetuous, imprudent, fearful, a slave to his passions, the plaything of the wildest fantasies. Every day he conjured up this theater of horror within the confines of his villa at the top end of San Isidro village: but only while the sun shone, because he always slept a dreamless sleep for all the hours when it was below the horizon. He was unmarried, with no close family, and no servants since he had placed himself in the hands of Facunda Lopez, who had started out as his cook, but by now had also taken over the duties of maid, housekeeper, gardener, and even groom. Facunda was a well-rounded woman of around forty years, who had no need to learn any erotic tricks to keep her master in the palm of her hand, because he was already there, and always would be. Whenever she talked to herself — and sometimes when she was speaking out loud too, as she was no model of discretion — she called the painter “Repetido,” because he always made love in exactly the same way, without any variation, and never missed a day, with his childlike insatiability. She went to him, without fail, when his siesta was coming to an end; she watched him pretending to be asleep for a moment, then flung herself on him.

For several months now, Prilidiano had been painting a picture for his own pleasure. It was the first time he had done this, without the painting being commissioned. Just for himself, not to be sold. This had unnerved him somewhat: at first he had doubts as to what kind of art might emerge from this gratuitous act. Painting with his usual excruciating meticulousness, he watched as the image slowly took shape, and it was just like any other. Perhaps it was art after all. He worked even more slowly than usual, because he was painting in his spare time. His original idea had been to paint Facunda sleeping her siesta naked. Naturally, the painting was and always would be his secret. But precisely in order not to let slip even a fraction of that secret, which was far more valuable than the canvas itself, he wanted to paint Facunda a second time, in the same bed, alongside the first figure. Muddleheaded as he was, he did not realize that this meant he would be portraying two women rather than the same one twice. By the time he caught on, it was too late. This totally confused him. He was a genius, but things like this were always happening to him. At least he had learned his lesson. And since he truly was the Repetido, he went on learning it siesta after siesta.

Although not unknown, visits to the villa were rare. When the Englishman turned up in mid-afternoon, the two inhabitants of the house were still sleepy. Facunda came out to hold his horse. She asked him who he was and what he wanted. After he had told her, Clarke began to feel it was impertinent of her to insist so much on whether he really wished to see the painter. Of course he did. Did he wish to see him, or to have his portrait painted? If the latter were the case, he would need to learn to be patient. He had chosen the slowest artist in the world. Annoyed at this unwanted and trivial advice, Clarke strode into the living room without waiting for the woman to invite him in, and sat down. Within a minute, the artist appeared. Clarke thought it must be his son, but it was the man himself. He was not in the least as Clarke had imagined him: a plump, dark-skinned youngster, turning bald although no one would have taken him to be more than twenty-five, and with the asymmetrical, slanted eyes of a lunatic. He had no manners, but the Englishman had enough for them both. Clarke explained he had been given the address by an aunt of the house owner, and then launched into discreet praise of the painter’s work. This was the first time that Prilidiano had heard anything of the sort. He agreed with everything he was told, with a charming ingenuousness. Facunda, who had apparently disappeared for good, suddenly reappeared in the room with a bottle of chilled claret and two glasses. In the twinkling of an eye, the two men downed half the bottle. As he warmed to his visitor, the painter confessed he was thinking of traveling to Europe to become a little less ignorant. Clarke spoke strongly against the idea. Prilidiano had all he needed for his development in Argentina. The artistic scene in Europe was exhausted; before much longer all the old world painters would start emigrating to the new. What about technique? the painter asked. He already had more than enough. And the old masters? When it came down to it, the Englishman said, they were not worth the effort. They continued in this vein for some time. Prilidiano was sorry he did not have any of his paintings in the house to show his enthusiastic admirer. He did have one, that of the two Facundas, but that was not finished and besides, it was not something to show to others. What he could offer were a few works hanging on the walls of the living room. Clarke stood up politely. They turned out to be pictures woven in wool and esparto grass by Manuelita Rosas, who had given them to the painter. Clarke stared at them without the slightest idea of what to say. They were abominable, wretched. Over the previous few days he had seen perhaps half a dozen portraits by Prilidiano in Buenos Aires salons. He thought them better than Reynolds and Gainsborough put together, the sign of true genius, not so much for the incredible psychological insight into their sitters they demonstrated, though that in itself was sublime, but for the way they created a surface. In that, they were beyond compare. Prilidiano achieved a visual clarity that was pure visibility, a way of taking the surface to the surface of the picture and making the two come together, of creating painting at the precise point where the viewer was — unbeknown to himself — wishing it might be realized. The painter’s triumph went far beyond the teasing interplay of ingenuity and knowledge. Manuelita’s ridiculously labored woolen offerings were the exact opposite. Could it be out of sarcasm that the genius had them hung in his living room, and was showing them off in this way? Clarke found it impossible to decide.

Once they had exhausted their discussion about painting, they sat down again and turned to the visitor’s plans. Clarke was a naturalist, and his intention was to travel into the hinterland to study several animals, and one in particular, which a number of scientific institutions in Europe were interested in.

“Well,” Prilidiano said lightheartedly, “if you take a good embalmer along with you, I suppose you’ll be able to get some fine specimens.”

No, that was not the Englishman’s intention at all. He said that the last thing he wanted to do was to embalm anything. He was not aiming to collect things, quite the opposite. He briefly outlined the new theory according to which some animals were descended from others, which meant there was no point in preserving them in any one fixed form. Nor was there any point taking them off somewhere else because according to another, complementary theory, in ancient times all the continents had been joined together as one. . the painter’s mind was filled with confusion. His guest might just as well have been talking Greek. He preferred to change topics, especially as something had occurred to him.

“So, you’re going out. . into the desert?”

“Yes.”

“But isn’t that where the Indians are?”

“Well, yes.”

“But my friend, as soon as they set eyes on you, they’ll kill you!”

“I hope I’ll have the chance to take proper precautions.”

Prilidiano did not insist, because his gadfly mind had already gone into reverse. However absurd the idea about some animals being descended from others might be, it had given him a notion as to how he might resolve the dilemma of his painting of Facunda taking her siesta. Which at the very least was proof that some ideas can descend from others. But he did not stop there (he always promised himself he would pick up the threads of his thoughts later on). It was no great matter that the Indians kill a traveler; that was a risk to be run like so many others. The question needed to be posed on a more general level. How could one be happy traveling? Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms? For years, he had been postponing his study trip to Europe because he could not imagine a life other than the one he was living, down to its minutest details. On the one hand he placed too much importance on happiness; on the other, he did not consider it so important that he should go in search of it. Painting and love were everywhere or they were nowhere. In a flash of inspiration of his childish, impish brain, Prilidiano got to the bottom of Darwinism and turned it completely upside down. Every change meant turning full circle. Eternity itself was a process of change, it was the present, the proof of happiness, and each and every one of these words was interchangeable.

“I’d really like to go with you,” he said, gloriously inconsistent, “but I can’t. I have so much to do!”

Before his expedition into the desert, Clarke paid a second and final visit to Palermo to say farewell to the Restorer and to thank him for providing him with a guide or “tracker,” a gaucho by the name of Gauna or Guana. He called on Rosas one Saturday afternoon at the epiphanic hour. After they had paid Manuelita the customary compliments, they shut themselves in Rosas’s office to talk. As usual, the Restorer looked relaxed and unkempt, his face bright red from all the wine he had drunk during a gargantuan barbecue he had eaten with the provincial governors. He smelled of grilled meat and wine. He had kept abreast of all the Englishman’s movements. That was the advantage of having a secret police, although it was no secret to anybody that he had one: he got to know everything about everybody else. But by the same token, they all knew everything about him, because in order to have a police force, he had to live a public life. Consequently,

the two of them wasted no time on practical matters. Instead, they talked about languages. Clarke’s Spanish was particularly good for a foreigner, something which he modestly put down to an innate talent. Rosas considered himself blessed with the same talent, to a remarkable degree. He had never put this to the test, nor did he need to do so, because his certainty required no proof. With such a gift, he was saying, he would like to try not such simple languages as English or French, but something really difficult like the babble of the black people. He might at any time decide to study and then write a grammar of the Argentine Bantu language. The Englishman nodded his assent.

“And please don’t think,” Rosas went on, “that I would be driven to this out of boredom, as I have no lack of things to keep me busy. And I do not mean simply political matters. If only you knew how many domestic problems I have to deal with! Take this fellow, for example. .” A little boy, one of his countless illegitimate children, had sneaked into the study, and was watching them from the depths of an armchair. “He has got it into his head to start squinting recently, and I’m worried he might get caught in a draught and stay stuck like that forever. I know that physiologically my fears are groundless, but I can’t help it, I can’t shake them off. He, however, could shake off his wretched habit, but he persists in it because he knows how much it upsets me.” The boy, a silent and pleasant-looking child, focused on them both perfectly well; perhaps he had no idea even of how to squint. “Although I must admit that when I was his age, I spent my whole time cross-eyed. But I’m not the kind of parent who is happy simply to say: ‘I was seven too once.’”

In response, Clarke merely nodded. He considered Rosas a genius; if not for languages, then for his “small talk.” This latest digression, for example, had been a ruse to find out just how much Clarke knew about Indian societies. But Clarke was not that stupid. Of course he knew what squinting meant to the Indians. Moreover, he was one of the few Europeans of his day who could have explained it in one of the native American languages. He had no intention however of telling the Restorer this, not even to fill a gap in the conversation.

“Well,” Rosas said, “are you hoping to discover a secret?”

Clarke replied that this was perhaps not the best way to describe his endeavor. The Legibrerian Hare he had been speaking of, which was the principal, if not the only, object of his expedition, was no secret. If it had been, how could he possibly expect to discover it with the limited means he had at his disposal, alone and lost in the vastness of the desert? Yet at the same time, it had to be one, for it to be worth all this trouble. Correctly phrased, the question would have to be: “What is so hidden that it is necessary to travel the globe to find it, but at the same time is so visible that it can be found simply by going to look for it? By definition, such a thing must be anywhere and everywhere, wherever one may be, in this very office. . ”

“But it’s not here,” Rosas replied, pretending to look under the table.

“That’s because the definition implies a circumlocution, because every definition can be considered a nominal one, and. .”

Rosas had followed him as closely as he was able, but even so his mind had wandered almost from the beginning, once he had grasped the main idea. He had sniffed Manuelita in there somewhere. Whatever else the famous Hare might or might not be, his daughter was it as well. And by his own hand. He had made this foolish girl the most completely visible element of his politics, but without providing any explanation, which was what made things visible. Darwin had been pointing in the same direction, but he had been so timid it was almost pitiful; he had found it necessary to base it on what Rosas had least need of: belief. As ever, an Argentine had got there first. He felt so pleased, so full of himself that he immediately took several decisions he had been hesitating over: first, to commission a full-length portrait of Manuelita from Pueyrredon’s son; second, to lend the Englishman Repetido for his journey; and third, to accede to the request he had received the previous day from the mother of Carlos Alzaga Prior, an aspiring young watercolor artist, and recommend that Clarke take him along. Everything fitted in, everything was part of the system. . he sat motionless for a moment, lost in the contemplation of his own grandeur.