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 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, soldiers and ranchers gathered at the fort to debrief. The horses were exhausted. The riders hung their heads, speaking in mournful grunts; all were grimy, their faced powdered with dust, some were falling asleep in the saddle. Krause joined one of the parties, with Rugendas slung over the back of his horse, sleeping off a dose of powdered poppy extract, his head hanging level with the stirrup, which gave it a ding like a bell's clapper at every step. The mantilla, however, had remained in place. Night had fallen by the time they reached the fort, and they reached it none too soon, for the darkness was absolute.