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

Maiquetia and Macuto ... in the midst of that peculiarly tropical sadness: night falling suddenly, without twilight, the sea washing back over Macuto again and again, futile and monotonous, the children always diving from the same rock ... And what for? What where they living for? So they could grow up to become ignorant primitives and, worse, deplorable human ruins by the time they reached maturity.
    In the afternoon everything became stranger still. The action had shifted away from El Tambo, so the two Germans set off in search of more views, guided by noises and hearsay. If the San Rafael valley was a crystal palace, and the tributary valleys its wings and courtyards, the Indians were coming out of the closets, like poorly kept secrets. The scenes followed one another in a certain order, but their traces on paper suggested other orders, which, in turn, affected the original scenes. As for the landscape, it remained indifferent. The catastrophe simply came in on one side and went out on the other, changing nothing in between.
    The Germans continued with their work. New impressions of the raid replaced the old ones. Over the course of the day, there was a progression—though it remained incomplete—towards unmediated knowledge. It is important to remember that their point of departure was a particularly laborious kind of mediation. Humboldt's procedure was, in fact, a system of mediations: physiognomic representation came between the artist and nature. Direct perception was eliminated by definition. And yet, at some point, the mediation had to give way, not so much by breaking down as by building up to the point where it became a world of its own, in whose signs it was possible to apprehend the world itself, in its primal nakedness. This is something that happens in everyday life, after all. When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. And it seems impossible to ascertain those thoughts except by a long series of inferences. What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else's mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind. Mutatis mutandis , the same thing happens with a painter and the visible world. It was happening to Rugendas. What the world was saying was the world.
    And now, as if to provide an objective complement, the world had suddenly given birth to the Indians. The noncompensatory mediators. Reality was becoming immediate, like a novel. The only thing missing was the notion of a consciousness aware not only of itself but of everything in the universe. Yet nothing was missing, for the paroxysm had begun.
    The afternoon was not a repetition of the morning, not even in reverse. Repetition is always a matter of waiting, rather than the repeated event itself. But in the grip of the paroxysm, there was no waiting for anything. Things simply happened, and the afternoon turned out to be different from the morning, with its own adventures, discoveries and creations.
    In the end, Rugendas collapsed, slumping onto the paper, struck down by a terrible cerebral seizure. Faint moans could be heard emerging from the balloon of black lace, inflated and deflated by his labored breathing. He slipped over Flash's neck, his stick of charcoal still pirouetting in the air, and fell to the ground. Krause got down to help him. Off in the distance, against a superb background of pinks and greens, the Indians were scattering, so tiny they could have been mounted on mosquitoes.
    Like a Mater Dolorosa, Krause held the unconscious body of his friend and master, under crowns of foliage multiplied to infinity. The trills of a sky-blue cephalonica encircled the silence. Night was falling. It had been falling for some time.
    In the last, miraculously drawn-out light,