The Hare Read online

  The Hare

  •

  CÉSAR AIRA

  Translated by Nick Caistor

  A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK ORIGINAL

  Contents

  1: The Restorer of the Laws

  2: The Legibrerian Hare

  3: The Hunt

  4: Carhué

  5: Traveling South

  6: Clarke’s Confession

  7: The Duck’s Egg

  8: The Underground

  9: The Offensive-Defensive Alliance

  10: Preparing for War

  11: The War of the Hare

  12: Clarke’s Story

  13: Happy Families

  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 neithe
r 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.