The Hare

10: Preparing for War

From that moment on, events gained momentum. The allies soon made their appearance. They all began to exist in a kind of perpetual symmetry, with emissaries coming and going the whole time. It was what the Indians most enjoyed, but only when they were about to go to war. In fact, it could almost be said that they used war as an excuse for them to find out instantly where the others were, what they were proposing, what direction they were heading in, at what speed, and so on. Not because they were really interested. The curious thing was that all these inquiries canceled themselves out as soon as they were embarked upon: by calculating the distances, they abolished them; by emphasizing the relative dispositions for movement as lines in a past crashing into the present, they put them all on the same plane of events, that of the flat pampas. They were not concerned whether something was near or far: an Indian would leap on to his horse to ride one league or a hundred. And they rode quickly, there was no doubt about that. At first Clarke thought they were pretending, not so much to deceive him as just for fun: from where they were to Salinas Grandes it must have been at least three hundred miles: and from one day to the next, a messenger traveled there and back, covering a distance that normally took two weeks. Yet they really did it: thanks to an ingenious system enabling the riders to snatch refreshment, and their mounts to rest and recuperate. . and above all, thanks to their knowledge of certain hills and viewpoints. What they succeeded in neutralizing in this way was precisely what they knew as if it were part of their own flesh and blood. Except that these Indians, in other words all Indians, did not seem to be made of flesh and blood but rather to be small, frantic machines. The sum of their passions unleashed or added together came to nothing, was simply a mechanical operation. Clarke found himself astonished at this paradox: inhuman as he was, he had thought when he first glimpsed the indigenous ways that he was approaching the truly human; but the more he became acquainted with them, the more he realized they were exactly the same as him. It was true that they could love, but had not he himself been in love? Although they did not so much resemble his past as an echo of it in the present. It was only now in the tumult of imminent combat that their starkest truth was revealed: a desire to leave and a reality of desire, a distancing by means of which the real both showed itself and at the same time vanished. The news from Salinas Grandes was reassuring: the break-up had been avoided, and some five thousand warriors were ready to leave at any moment, as soon as they knew when and in which direction. The creek where the three friends were camped, and which Carlos Alzaga Prior had baptized the Rainy One, became the nerve center for collecting and dispatching information. Two or three days were spent in this, during which time it never once stopped raining or drizzling. Truly this was a different landscape. Water everywhere, and everything gray; it was hard to recognize the pampa. Their situation had changed as well. Colqán arrived with his splendid warriors; two more chieftains also appeared, so that the numbers in the camp swelled, making it seem like one long wild party. They ate, drank, sent and received messages all day and night, as if they were in a transparent telegrapher’s cabin. Spying was also commonplace: everyone was a spy, and it was impossible to tell if information came from allies or from their enemies. Coliqueo seemed to be fully committed as leader of the revolt. Clarke began to suspect that there were chieftains who were in contact with both sides; he had no concrete reasons for thinking so, but it occurred to him that nothing could have been easier, since it was nothing more than a matter of words shouted in the distance; without being cynical, he himself would have felt a natural impulse to keep in with everyone. Even among the leadership there was a sense of ambiguity. For example, they made as if they did not take Coliqueo seriously, laughed at him, saw him as the palest of phantoms of a true threat. But they had no choice. Were it not for the fact that Cafulcurá’s disappearance was the cause of all this, it could have been seen as the reason for their uncertainty. Now he had disappeared, it was as if the opposing forces were inevitably drawn toward an empty zone.

The time flew by. The rain, the poring over maps, the consulting with emissaries all served to fill an improbable few days of inactivity. Gauna was pursuing his own aims (but the Widow did not appear), Carlos discovered countless amusements among the nations who were thus thrown together and having a wild time of it in the rain (though there was not a word about his Yñuy), and Clarke did not budge from the war council, soon becoming their chief adviser. He was irritated by the irrationality that governed the savages, but he had seen worse, and as long as they were not fighting for real, there was no serious harm done. He had only a slight problem with one of the chieftains, a short, almost dwarfish Indian by the name of Maciel, and that was over something extraordinarily silly. It so happened that they regularly held their meetings beneath a rectangular covering supported on four posts. The rain collected in the center of this awning, and they tipped the water out whenever it threatened to spill over them. They did not have to do this very often, as a fire lit directly under the bulge evaporated most of the water. This was a ridiculous system, but the Indians preferred it to the normal one of having a sloping cover, which they said would mean that water was constantly dripping off one end and splashing them. Once, when Clarke got up to ease the stiffness out of his legs after several hours of sitting down, he stood up so hastily that he bumped into the roof, which at that moment was heavy with water. His action caused a great stream of it to cascade down one side, so that a freezing jet of water struck Maciel full in the back. Since the savage was in a complete daydream at the time, the sudden soaking made him cry out in shock. He wanted to cut Clarke’s throat on the spot, and it was all the others could do to calm him down. After that, as is so often the case, the two men became the closest of friends. As well as being irascible, this dwarf was a habitual drunkard, and his drunken fantasies focused with a maniacal inevitability on Clarke, who he said reminded him of his father.

One other thing disturbed the Englishman, and that was the readiness with which the Indians executed spies. They went too far. Even the slightest suspicion led to yet another throat-slitting. The last straw was when they summarily sentenced to death a poor Indian caught some distance from the camp carrying nothing more suspicious than a sack of dahlia bulbs. Clarke made it his personal responsibility to get him pardoned. It was pretty obvious that the fellow was no spy or anything of the kind. But the savages around the leaders’ fire insisted on cutting his throat. Although their reasons for doing so were nonexistent, when challenged they invented some. One of them came up with the idea that the bulbs were a coded message based on how many of them there were, their size, and even the bits of dirt they had on them (he could not prove any of this, because both bag and contents had been stolen). Another chief suggested it might be a delayed-action message: when the dahlias bloomed, the enemy might read its meaning in their colors. Clarke replied that was the most absurd idea he had ever heard. It made no difference. He fell back on an argument which he considered of central importance: saving a life with a view to the future. The Indians laughed wholeheartedly at this. They told him it was like prohibiting an Englishman from taking tea in order to save the parliamentary system. The argument was complicated still further by a spurious discussion as to whether it was more correct to use the word “bulb” (in Mapuche) or “tuber,” which was more graphic. However ridiculous it might seem, they spent three hours of byzantine discussion going over and over this point. In the end, they cut the poor unfortunate’s throat.

“Are you happy now, are you satisfied?” Clarke asked them angrily.

Yes. They were delighted. They even had the gall to add: “We discovered something interesting: bulb smuggling carries the death penalty.”

At this, they all started to laugh, even Maciel, who until then had been the only one to take Clarke’s side, not because he was convinced but rather out of a fantasy of friendship. Curiously, Clarke quickly got over the incident; at other times in his life he would have left, slamming the door behind him. There might have been several reasons for him not doing so on this occasion, but perhaps the main one was that there was no door to slam, nor indeed any “outside” for him to exit to. This made a great difference. To a large extent, it was impossible to blame the Indians. Not because they were innocent or stupid, but simply due to this lack of an inside or outside for his not inconsiderable intelligence to latch onto.

Due to the urgency of the situation and the prestige he enjoyed as a shaman and close friend of Cafulcurá, Mallén was the natural focal point for all the deliberations. These went on endlessly, largely because there was nothing else to do. But Mallén pushed Clarke to the fore with a constant stream of requests for advice. The Englishman adapted his counsel to what the Indians considered logical, but as he himself had a quite different logic, and as their pampa way of arguing was for him simply play-acting, something in him was plainly still au dessus de la mêlée, was ready, even if only in theory, to change opinion in an instant, to switch sides without the slightest reason; and this was precisely what the Indians most respected. Simultaneity brought the collapse of necessity. It was as though the narrative were being erased. All links between events were blown away. With the light of reason dimmed, all kinds of causal shifts took place, and they seemed to concentrate on one man, who was Clarke. An aura surrounded him. So much so that when after four days of waiting on the banks of the Rainy One the time was ripe for them to unite all their forces to crush Coliqueo, thanks to an almost silent decision, which seemed so natural there was no need to vote on it, the Englishman was invested with the rank and responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief of the allied armies of the Huilliche-Tehuelche confederation.