an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira Page A

details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction (even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection) that widower simply cannot see a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife.
    Something else the Germans had to take into account, as they remarked in their conversation, was that the Indian was an Indian through and through, right down to minimal fragments, such as a toe, from which the whole Indian could be reconstructed, although they had a different example in mind: not a toe or a cell, but the pencil stroke on paper tracing the outline of a toe or a cell.
    All this led Krause to a conclusion that was almost as bewildering as the story of the innocent assassin: compensation was alien to the Indians. In fact this conclusion derived from a thought that had often crossed his mind (and not only his): every physical defect, however minor or inevitable, even the gradual, imperceptible wear and tear of aging, requires a compensation, in the form of intelligence, wisdom, talent, practical or social skills, power, money, etc.
    This was why Krause the dandy attached so much importance to his physical appearance, his elegance and his youth: they allowed him to dispense with everything else. And yet, as a civilized man, he could not escape from the compensatory system. Painting, his art of choice, was a way of complying with its minimal requirements. Requirements which, until that day, he had considered absolute; without a minimum of compensation it would be impossible to go on living. But that was before he had seen the Indians, and now he had to admit that they did not respect the minimum—on the contrary, as objects of painting, they made fun of it. The Indians had no need of compensation, and they could allow themselves to be perfectly coarse and unpleasant without feeling any obligation to be well-dressed and elegant to make up for it. What a revelation it was for him!
    But no sooner had he said this than he remembered the state of his poor friends face (hidden though it was behind the mantilla) and began to worry about how Rugendas might interpret his disquisition.
    Needless scruples, for his friend was plunged in the deepest of hallucinations: the non-interpretive kind. In a sense, Rugendas was the one who had taken non-compensation to the limit. But he did not know this, nor did it matter to him.
    The proof of this achievement was that while conversing silently with his own altered state (of appearance and mind), he continued to see things and, whatever those thing were, they seemed to be endowed with "being." He was like a drunk at the bar of a squalid dive, fixing his gaze on a peeling wall, an empty bottle, the edge of a window frame, and seeing each object or detail emerge from the nothingness into which it had been plunged by his inner calm. Who cares what they are? asks the aesthete in a flight of paradox. What matters is that they are.
    Some might say these altered states are not representative of the true self. So what? The thing was to make the most of them! At that moment, he was happy. Any drunk, to pursue the comparison, can vouch for that. But, for some reason, in order to be happier still (or unhappier still, which comes to the same thing, more or less) one has to do certain things that can only be done in a sober state. Such as making money (which more than any other activity requires a clear head) so as to go on purchasing elation. This is contradictory, paradoxical, intriguing, and may prove that the logic of compensation is not as straightforward as it seems.
    Reality itself can reach a "non-compensatory" stage. Here it should be recalled that Mendoza is not in the tropics, not even by a stretch of the imagination. And Humboldt had developed his procedure in places like