“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.
On their way back to Buenos Aires, the two guests let their horses set their own pace. They took the low road, enjoying the evening air as the English often do, saying little to each other; the silence of the empty fields allowed them to speak without raising their voices even though their mounts went different ways around the ruts in the track. They watched as a startled chaja bird scrambled away from them in panic, falling all over itself as it did so. Both of them simultaneously thought of the Restorer. Plump pigeons bent the branches of some terebinth trees almost down to the ground. No doubt they were settling for the night. To their left, the dun-colored river was as still as a lake; only where the water lapped against the edge of the green-tinged shoreline was there any sign of movement, and then only if one peered closely. Thoroughly familiar with this landscape, the Consul ceased to pay it any attention, and concentrated instead on political matters. This meant he was neglecting his guest, but that did not worry him unduly. He was one of the old school of diplomats who considered it no part of a consul’s duties to act as a guide for his fellow countrymen. He kept his courtesies to a strict minimum, and on this occasion felt he had more than done his duty with the visit to the country’s main attraction, the Dictator. Besides which, there were two further considerations: first, if it were true that Clarke intended to travel into the interior, he could obviously look after himself in Buenos Aires; and second, politics gave him a lot to think about: so much indeed that twenty-four hours a day were not enough. So the Consul became completely engrossed in his own thoughts. Clarke meanwhile let his horse pick its own way. Rather than staring at the land, he was looking up at the sky, which was a wash of purple, with broad streaks of blue and pink. It was still stiflingly hot, and the atmosphere was oppressively humid. The silence was crisscrossed by the whirring of insects. . When the Consul raised his eyes again he was intrigued by what Clarke was doing. He had let go of the reins and his hands were busy doing something at the level of his stomach. From behind, the Consul had no idea what this might be. He pushed his horse on, twisting to one side so that he could find out without seeming indiscreet. Clarke was concentrating so hard he did not even notice. He was holding a small metal box open in his left hand, and doing something inside it with his other hand. The Consul recognized the apparatus as a chromatograph. It was made up of rows of tiny metal rings, into which Clarke was inserting needles with a dexterity that spoke of long practice. The Consul moved no closer. More than a waste of time, the operation seemed to him sinister: it was like sticking pins into the soft colors of the sunset.
A few days later, with all his preparations for the journey to the interior completed, the naturalist made another trip out in this same direction, but this time he rode considerably further, to a village north of Buenos Aires where a well-known painter lived in seclusion. On this occasion, Clarke traveled alone. He set out in the early morning, enjoyed a solitary picnic mid-route at around eleven, took a siesta under a weeping willow on the riverbank, then continued unhurriedly on his way, at little more than a snail’s pace. Below a certain threshold of speed, he found it hard to direct the horse: he was unsure whether they were advancing or not. He wanted to find the painter awake, but knew that whatever allowances he made, he always underestimated the length of siesta that people slept in these tropical climes. There was no well-defined track, and nobody seemed to be about. Just once he met a cart driven by a black man dressed in a green livery as brilliant as a parrot’s plumage. A child of about four or five ran in front, shooing off the pigeons that settled in the path the cart was inching its way along. The draught animals were a spectacle in their own right: twin white oxen, which had been so badly castrated that with the passage of time (they looked to be hundreds of years old), they had taken on the appearance of Japanese bulls, with swollen dewlaps and so many folds of white skin dangling from their backs that they appeared to be covered in sheets of marble, like Bernini statues in Rome. The two men greeted each other with great courtesy as they passed. At the time, it seemed to Clarke that the black man was wearing a pair of eyeglasses, but afterward he was not sure he had seen correctly. A little further on, where the riverbank became steeper, he saw a group of creatures which from a distance he took to be crabs, but which turned out to be hedgehogs lying uncurled in the sunshine. A curious thing happened. The hedgehogs, which are the most timid creatures imaginable, saw him at the very moment he caught sight of them, but instead of reacting as a group, they did so one by one, and though this was a very rapid process, Clarke was able to see how each of them took flight. Not that it could really be called a flight: hedgehogs move extremely slowly, but if frightened, they do contrive to disappear somehow or other. As Clarke watched, each of them rolled up into a ball, and this meant they all began to roll down the riverbank and into the water. One after the other, until there was not a single animal left, before the Englishman had so much as dared to blink.