The Hare

2: The Legibrerian Hare

To carry on speaking, Cafulcurá took the cigar from his mouth with the slowest of gestures, wreathed the whole while in a cloud of smoke that gave off a medicinal odor. He muttered the words with his eyes half-closed, as he sat bare-chested on the leather mats strewn on the floor of the tent.

“Wouldn’t you say,” he said, “that travelers to the desert always come to impose some kind of law?”

Clarke spread his arms cautiously, palms outstretched: stated in such general terms, the proposition was irrefutable. The Indian chief’s way of speaking, which Clarke was listening to after an incident-free journey since setting out from Buenos Aires two weeks earlier, had a certain effeminate quality to it, at least on first acquaintance (but this was an impression which, like so many others, vanished with greater familiarity); an uncertainty, something imprecise which itself was not easy to define precisely. Which made it all the more difficult to find oneself in agreement with him on any point in particular.

“One law,” Cafulcurá went on, “is made by a legislator; the other is the kind which already exists in nature, and which we only call ‘law’ by extension.”

“Or vice versa,” the stranger ventured to suggest, since he knew that the Mapuche word for “law” could also mean many other things, among which were “venture,” “suggest,” “stranger,” “know,” “word,” and “Mapuche.”

The chieftain nodded modestly, as if he himself had spoken. He breathed in the smoke once more, rolled his head vaguely, then continued his speech in the same slow drawl he had been using for two or three hours now:

“What the traveler does not know is that when this law is made and/or discovered, it creates a magic circle around itself, from which escape is no easy matter.”

A lengthy silence.

“I beg you not to read anything threatening, or even prophetic, into my words, Mr. Clarke. Simply take them as a description, or a ‘law’ if you like. This circle around a law is a world in miniature within our world, which itself is a miniature. We create the world to fit in with our personal system, so that man can become world. In other words, so that the miniature can become miniature. But miniatures have their own laws, you know. It is not only space which can become minute: it also happens to the corresponding time, which becomes extremely fast. That is why life is short.”

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.”

This made the whole thing extremely suspect, but Clarke still threw his head back and looked up. For a while, the children tried to give him indications, using the stars as points of reference, since with their keen eyesight they could see them even during the day. Clarke soon gave up. In fact, he could not decide from what they said whether they were talking about a real animal, or a star of the same name. He went back over to Mallén, where Gauna was waiting for him too. Meanwhile, almost everyone had joined in the game of hockey: there must have been a hundred Indians playing, having a whale of a time. The horses galloped in every direction, frequently crashing into each other, to loud cheers from the spectators. In one of these collisions, an Indian was knocked to the ground, and broke his neck. After that, the game quickly petered out. As they were riding back to the camp, Clarke spoke his thoughts out loud:

“I wonder if that tale about the hare was something real, something that really happened, or whether it was some kind of ceremony or ritual?”

Mallén nodded, showing interest, but no desire to express his own opinion on the matter; to him the difference seemed to be negligible, a mere intellectual quibble. In order to say something, he commented:

“Not here, but further south in regions where we once lived, the winds are so strong that no one would be surprised to see a small animal, a hare for example, flying over their head.”

They were joined by a single rider also on his way back to the camp. Mallén greeted him with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, then turned to introduce him.

“Do you two know each other? Alvarito Reymacurá. Mister Clarke from England.”

“Yes, we met yesterday,” said the Indian. He was one of Cafulcurá’s countless children, and a personage of some importance in the court. The son of a giant, he was himself rather small, but he was attractive and had the reputation of being obsessed with sex.

Mallén made some comment about the spectacle they had vainly hoped to witness. Alvarito responded with a brief cackle, although he gave no hint of a smile, which was something the Indians never did.

“How can one see what’s already been, my dear Mallén?”

He must immediately have felt that his comment was out of place, and corrected himself harshly:

“But who cares about that kind of nonsense?”

“Well,” Mallén said with a deep sigh, “if I’m not mistaken, I think our distinguished visitors were quite interested.”

Alvarito corrected himself a second time, turning ninety degrees on the horse’s back as though in a swivel chair, until he was facing directly toward Clarke (though he was staring at the ground). He said:

“Of course, of course! For anyone who has not seen it, it’s of undoubted interest. Even if they never get to see it.”

“It’s disappointing, isn’t it?” said the Englishman.

“No, no, not in the least!”

Mallén was silent. Then he said he had things he must attend to, and tapped his mount on the neck, urging it off in another direction.

“Goodbye,” Alvarito called out to him.

“Be seeing you.”

“I wonder, Mister Clarke, if you would care to come and have a cup of tea at my tent, although I’m afraid it must be in a dreadful mess.”

“I’d love to.”

“And Mister. .”

“Gauna, at your service.”

So Gauna came along too. Alvarito’s tent was nearby, in the first line of the village. As they dismounted, several small grayhounds came to rub themselves against the Indian’s legs. The Indians always left their horses without tying them up, and Clarke decided to do the same.

They went in. All the tents were exactly the same, inside and out. A group of about ten Indians were playing cards in the center of this one.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, friends, but these gentlemen and I would like to talk on our own for a while.”

“Don’t mention it, Alvarito!” one of the men said, picking up the cards without mixing them. “We’ll go over to Felix Barrigón’s.”

And so they left. Soon afterward, two women came in with some rolls of leather, which they spread out on the ground for mats. The three men sat down and the host called for some tea. Once they were settled, Alvarito Reymacurá crossed his eyes in a squint that seemed almost superhuman, and stared down at the ground. This was a sign of great courtesy that few in the village had offered Clarke until now; this made him feel better. They began to talk.

Summing up the various replies Reymacurá gave to the Englishman’s hesitant questions, and stripping them of their many contradictions, vague points, and digressions, what he conveyed was more or less the following:

“As the perspicacious traveler has quite rightly noted from the attitude of the wise shaman, the question about the reality of the hare which caused all the fuss today was irrelevant. It was something which, literally, was of no interest to anyone. To explain why, as indeed to explain any other lack of interest, one must return to general principles, which might seem to bear no relation to the original question. To put it simply, it could be said that for centuries the central political problem for the savages has been that of the discontinuity of territory.” He did not propose to go into details, partly because it was too complicated, and partly because it spoke for itself. What other problem could the wide open spaces of the pampas have, if indeed they had any, apart from that of discontinuity? As a result of many years pondering this problem, the Indians had constructed a whole logic of continuities, and this had to be borne in mind when even the most trifling event took place. The Mapuches were constantly creating continuities, and so adept were they at this that they no longer even needed to employ visible or virtual connections, but simply used the continuity itself to perform that function. “Take for example what happened today,” Alvarito said. “The hare runs, but by definition it must run across territory. If for example it is running on the continent, it cannot be running on the island. But then if it takes off and lands on the other side of the channel separating the continent from the island, then it is doing so, isn’t it? It is like that sad story,” he added, heightening still further the rather stilted mannerisms of his way of talking, “of the Indian who was leading his three-year-old son by the hand in some celebration where there were crowds of people. At one point his attention wandered and he let go of the boy for an instant: when he looked again, he had vanished. The only thing left on the ground close to the despairing father’s feet was the paper windmill the little boy had been carrying. A kidnapping? Fate? He never saw him again.

“None of this,” he explained, “involved any complicated reasoning. On the contrary, they were all children’s stories, they could be followed with a minimum of attention. The hare has big ears, which allow it to hear what is normally inaudible, even what is very far off. But the hare is also the emblem of speed. It is so fast that it makes one think of that other world in miniature in which time is all squashed together. And in the process, we move unconsciously from the ‘real’ hare to its opposite pole. . ”

“But there has to be some element of reality,” Clarke butted in.

“Always, always!” the Indian responded emphatically. “You should know that better than any of us, if, as I have heard, you are a naturalist.”

Clarke nodded.

“We Indians are very ignorant, very stupid; we cannot grasp either the very tiny or the very large, and we don’t know much about what’s in between. At best, we only occasionally pay attention to what we are told, then we have the effrontery to forget it. . The hare may be a character in a tale, and that tale may fly over disconnected territories, and always reach the other side of the earth. . As you know, my father has based his government on fables; there is no need for me to tell you any, because you might misinterpret them; he even sets himself up as the hero of a fabulous tale for his subjects. . ”

At that moment two elderly shamans came into the tent, bowing and whispering into Alvarito’s ear. Such was his interest in what they were telling him that he immediately uncrossed his eyes.

“Show him in,” he finally said to them, and to his two guests: “I must beg you to wait outside for me while I deal with a most important and pressing matter which has arisen. It will only take a minute, then I’ll be all yours. . to continue with our most interesting talk.”

Without ceasing for a moment to offer his apologies, he led them to the tent’s back entrance, where he gave instructions for them to be attended to. Several women were sitting in the shade of awnings; they at once laid out mats for them and offered them tea. As they then immediately returned to their entertaining conversation, Clarke and Gauna were left with nothing else to do than to stare out into the distance. From time to time, groups of horsemen sped by, without any obvious destination. The salt flats gave off a blinding dry white glare. One of the groups of riders had the effect of silencing the women, who all stared after them. The two men did not notice anything special about the riders, but from the comments that followed they learned that it had been Juana Pitiley, Cafulcurá’s favorite wife, who was setting off for Carhué to undergo a water treatment for her old bones. Alvarito’s wives were young (as he was also, since he could be no more than thirty), they had viper’s tongues, and there on the back porch of the tent they had an enchanting, ungroomed look: they looked far prettier when they were not smeared with their ceremonial grease.

After about an hour an Indian came out of the tent and said that Reymacurá begged them to excuse him, as his timetable had become terribly complicated, but he would come and see them that evening if he could find a free moment, etc., etc. Resignedly, Clarke walked round to the front of the spacious dwelling with Gauna, and the pair of them mounted and rode off.

They set off along the avenue containing the chieftains’ tents, until Clarke shook off the torpor that all the tea and the waiting had induced in him and asked himself in a sudden panic where they might be heading. He had no desire whatsoever to get into conversation with Cafulcurá again, or with anyone else for that matter. His head began to ache at the mere thought of it. He looked round him. Gauna was lost in his own thoughts, with a black look on his face, though there was nothing unusual about that. Clarke asked him what had happened to the young watercolorist, whom he had not seen since that morning.

“I think he went to bathe in the creek,” the gaucho replied.

“We could also go and cool off a bit, don’t you think?”

Gauna shrugged. He raised his arm and pointed to the far side of the encampment. “It’s over there.”

They sped off at a gallop. Repetido was marvelously docile. Because of the way the tents were lined up, and because Clarke felt he had no right as a guest to cut between them as the Indians did, they had to travel in a circle until they reached the perimeter of the capital, then turned sharply to the left. The plain dipped gently in front of them, and although the slope was almost imperceptible, they felt as though they were constantly pitching forward. Their mounts were happy. The clear air showed signs that the afternoon was drawing to a close. The sun was no longer as blinding as it had been throughout the day. From dawn to dusk, it gave the sensation that tiny prismatic crystals were floating above Salinas Grandes, reducing everything to a white sheen.

The river ran narrow and cool through beds of osiers. A large number of bathers had spent the day in its streams and on its banks. About two hundred horses were standing loose near an open, treeless beach which seemed to be the official bathing place. Indians were sleeping, sunbathing, or playing cards, while children scampered noisily in and out of the water. The two new arrivals dismounted and walked for a while. As they went upstream, they came upon groups of youngsters who were enjoying themselves in more secluded recesses. One of them was Carlos Alzaga Prior, who approached them, his hair dripping. They sat together on a grassy high bank overlooking a calm backwater.

“Have you been having a good time?” Clarke asked Prior, treating him familiarly because he was so young.

“First class. What about you two?”

There was a silence. Gauna was still wrapped in his own thoughts. Finally, Clarke said: “Not so good. These Indians are always talking to themselves.”

The youth burst out laughing, but they did not feel like joining in. The Englishman had come to think he had acted hastily when he had agreed to take Prior along. In fact, it had been very irresponsible of the young man’s parents to give him permission to undertake the journey to the perilous desert as though it were a trip round the family estate. Parents like that, Clarke surmised, were the sort who would most readily accuse him of being responsible if anything happened to their son, in a classic defense mechanism of laying the blame elsewhere. As for his artistic apprenticeship, that had obviously been an excuse, because Clarke had not even seen him pick up a brush. Prior gave them a detailed account of his prowess at swimming, diving, and so on. His chatter eventually wearied Clarke, who suggested he return to his friends. Prior did so at once, a broad smile on his face.

“What a child,” Gauna muttered when he was out of earshot.

“Señor Gauna, you were fifteen once,” Clarke chided him.

“But he’s been smoking something. Didn’t you see how dilated his pupils were?”

“The truth is, I didn’t notice.”

They sat in silence for a while. They gazed idly at people swimming by them in the river. Birds were singing in the trees. In front of them, the sun dipped toward the horizon.

“Tell me frankly, Señor Gauna, is something bothering you?”

“Lots of things.”

“Such as what?”

“For example, the fact that the Indians are such great liars.”

This interested Clarke. Not because he needed confirmation that they were caught up in a web of lies, but because it might be useful for him to know what reasons his tracker had for saying so.

“Take that story of the ‘hare’ which ‘took off,’” Gauna said, a sarcastic emphasis in his voice. “Did you believe that?”

“There wasn’t much to believe, that’s for sure.”

“But it’s as if they were making fun of us!”

Hearing this remark, the Englishman’s curiosity took on a defensive edge. There was no doubt Gauna was treating him as stupid, because it was to him that almost all the comments had been addressed. He asked Gauna for an explanation. Gauna had one ready, and Clarke could not deny it was both ingenious and surprising.

“They say: the hare ‘took off.’ In Mapuche, that verb can also mean ‘was stolen,’ ‘was made to vanish.’ We have no reason to know of these double meanings, so we understand it in its first sense, and they go on with the joke at our expense; even when you ask them if what happened is real or an interpretation, they can permit themselves to lie with the truth, as they always do. And between you and me, I reckon that ‘hare’ is the name they give to some valuable object. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed their habit of giving very valuable objects names. OK, so there’s a robbery. When we reach the spot where they’ve caught the thief, or an accomplice, who knows, they put on this horse ballet for us, stare up at the sky, play the fool, like that idiot Mallén. Meanwhile under our very noses, they are dealing with the culprit. . ”

“You mean that poor man who fell from his horse? But that was an accident!”

“Yes, an ‘accident’. . And on top of it all, that hypocrite Reymacurá starts to give you a metaphysics lesson! But he couldn’t help letting a few of the most obvious sarcasms escape, like that story about the father who lost his son. Can you tell me what on earth a tale like that had to do with anything?”

“I took it as another example, and a very appropriate one. He was saying that a stolen child reappears as an adult somewhere else, and so establishes a continuity between different places and times.”

Gauna did not even bother to contradict him. Clarke had in fact taken this example (though he did not say this to Gauna) as a delicate touch by their Indian friend, because Clarke himself had been a foundling adopted and raised by a well-to-do middle-class family in Kent. It was hardly surprising that the Indians knew this, thanks to Rosas’s secret police, who were bound to have discovered it.

“And another thing,” Gauna went on. “An hour later, Cafulcurá’s wife sets out on a journey. Some coincidence, don’t you think?”

“But that fellow has thirty wives or more! There must always be one setting off on a journey somewhere.”

“But precisely that one, Juana Pitiley, the only one who is rich and powerful?”

He had really gone too far with his suspicions. The Englishman thought it better to change tack, and offered a kind of abstract summing up of their discussion.

“Words in Mapuche seem to have pretty unstable meanings.”

“No more so than in other languages.”

“I can assure you that’s not true of English.”

“I don’t know English, but if I look at Spanish, it’s just as ambiguous. For example, you can give your own name to anything you like: that tree, for instance — look at those low branches, don’t they look like a chair? If I came to have my siesta here every day, I’d end up calling that tree ‘chair.’. .”

“Good God!”

Gauna closed his mouth. After a while, he opened it again:

“And anyway, you can’t deny there’s a contradiction in the very fact of their speeches. We all know that savages show ‘an invincible repugnance toward speaking, except when it is absolutely necessary.’ Yet you yourself said a while ago that your head was spinning from all the chitchat you had to put up with. So that these people’s game consists in finding ‘absolute necessity’ where we see nothing but smoke rings.”

“And that seems suspicious to you too?”

“Yes, sir! Very suspicious!”

“Tell me something, Gauna, you don’t talk like a gaucho. Did you go to school as a boy?”

At that, Gauna lapsed back into being a gaucho again, mute and introspective. He gazed down at the tracks the busy ants were making on the ground. Tearing off a blade of grass, he chewed on it, then finally seemed to make up his mind:

“Of course I went to school. I. .”

That was as far as he got, because the reappearance of Carlos Alzaga Prior made him fall more silent than ever. The boy came to tell them he was going back to the tents with his new-found friends.

“But who are they?” Clarke wanted to know.

Carlos offered to show him, beaming like an idiot all the while. He led Clarke up a nearby bank and pointed out a group of young men and women. Most of the women had bulging stomachs in various stages of pregnancy.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you!”

“No, thanks.”

A lot of people were diving into the water.

“Did you have a swim?” Carlos asked him.

“The truth is, I’d love a dip.”

Carlos encouraged him to have one. The sun was still high enough for him to dry off afterward. They agreed to meet at dinner time. Clarke undressed and dived into the water, which turned out to be freezing. He was quite a good swimmer, and the exercise relaxed him; what with being on horseback and having to squat for all the conversations, he was very stiff. By the time he got out, Gauna had gone. He threw himself down on the grass and dozed. The sky had turned pink, the birdsong became more evocative, haunting. He saw some huge wild cattle lumber down for their evening drink. Through the leaves of the trees, in his drowsy state, he watched as the sky became a dark blue, and the tree trunks slowly turned black.

When he returned to the beach, there were only a few Indians left. They all greeted him with elaborate courtesy. His horse stood waiting. He set off at a walk in the dusk.

At night, everything was fire. In the universal classification, the Mapuches were a fire culture. They lit them on any excuse, and enjoyed them immensely. At every step, near and far, fires, torches, bonfires shone out, creating marvelous reflections on the bodies of the Indians, whose nightly pleasure was to daub themselves in grease from head to foot. Neither Cafulcurá, nor Alvarito, nor any of the main chieftains appeared, busy as they seemed to be with their political conversations. Gauna and Clarke ate grilled meat with some tight-lipped ministers: Carlos Alzaga Prior came by for a minute to say he would be spending the night with friends. Gauna, who had not managed to take a siesta, retired early. Clarke sat for a while outside the tent, smoking a pipe, watching the fires and the Indians passing by. He was about to go and lie down when Mallén appeared.

“How are you, Mister Clarke, have you eaten?”

“Scrumptiously.”

“I’m glad. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to look after you properly, but something urgent cropped up. . you know how it is.”

“Oh, yes? Something urgent? A war? I suppose you couldn’t tell me anyway?”

“No, no. Nothing that serious, trifles really, the same as usual.”

“But you yourself told me yesterday that it wasn’t usual for you to be so busy.”

“That’s true, but you will admit that sometimes, the usual can pile up.”

“True enough.”

“By the way, tomorrow there is a gap in the protocol, and Cafulcurá asked me to convey his invitation to you. For my part, I should also like to offer you a rather fuller apology for our lack of courtesy.”

“I’m all ears.”

Mallén had not sat down. The two men were standing talking next to the entrance to the tent, and the shaman darted a glance inside. He seemed unwilling to speak there, as if afraid Gauna might be listening. This was a groundless fear, as they could both clearly hear the gaucho’s snores.

“Let’s walk a little, if you’re not tired.”

They set off in the direction of the nearest bonfire.

“I trust your tent is comfortable.”

“Fine, thank you. Are you expecting Namuncurá soon?”

“Not at all. He could be away weeks if he feels like it.”

Clarke had been surprised at being lodged in the tent of the chieftain’s son and heir, who was away on a trip. Especially since all the man’s wives were still in occupation.

When they had walked some distance, Mallén began to stammer, in the typically ceremonious manner which meant he was about to say something he had previously thought over.

“In the first place, I’d like to say how sorry I am that your visit has coincided with these. . shall we say, special circumstances. All this surveillance, all these security measures. . they must have been a burden to you.”

Although Clarke had been unaware of anything of the sort, he thought it wiser to keep quiet.

“But how were you to know that Cafulcurá is to celebrate his seventieth birthday soon, and that he is cautious enough to take some old-standing prophecies seriously? Cautious isn’t the word!. . Well, with him, one never knows. I also wanted to talk to you about that. I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that certain of our chieftain’s characteristics must have seemed to you, at the very least, surprising. I don’t intend to make excuses for him, but some of them do have their explanation. I’ve known him for countless years now, and I think I understand him better than anyone. So I beg you to take what I am going to say as a corrective to your impressions, but one that in no way implies any disrespect for your perspicacity. Bear in mind that this incoherent old man, high on grass, who gave you all the rigmarole about the continuum, has for the past fifty years borne on his shoulders all the responsibility of governing an empire made up of a million souls scattered throughout the south of the continent, and has done, and will continue to do, a pretty good job. From his youth onward, Cafulcurá has worshipped simplicity and spontaneity. But one can’t help thinking, and as soon as one does, all simplicity goes to the devil. And also, to be truly spontaneous, one would have to say ‘spontaniety,’ wouldn’t one?”

The joke was different in Huilliche of course, which was the language they were speaking in. But it survives the translation.

“Which explains,” Mallén went on, “his consumption of hallucinogenic grasses, although I must admit it’s gone a bit far of late. He uses them to create images, which interact with words to create hieroglyphs, and consequently new meanings. Given the prismatic nature of our language, there is no better way of bringing out meaning, in other words, of governing. And also, given that his own personal standing is based on his position as a man-myth, how could he think in any other fashion? He’s looking for speed, speed at any cost, and so he turns to the imaginary, which is pure speed, oscillating acceleration, as against the fixed rhythm of language.”

By now, they had reached the opposite crescent of tents, and so the shaman invited him to turn back. In the distance, the sound of feasting and quarreling could be heard; fires gleamed all round in the darkness.

“There’s no moon tonight,” Mallén said.

As they came up to Namuncurá’s tent once more, Mallén finally explained what the chieftain’s invitation consisted of.

“Tomorrow at noon there’ll be a hare hunt nearby in your honor, if you’re free. Good: I can assure you that this time you won’t be disappointed as you were today, although I can’t bring myself to believe that any hare will fly. We don’t want you to get a bad impression of us. Up to now, we’ve given you too many words and not enough action, haven’t we? But without words, there can be no experience. Although without experience, there can be no words — or anything else, for that matter.”