He left the tent heaving a sigh of relief. The light outside was devastating. Everything in Salinas Grandes was the harshest white. He had no need to ask Gauna in which direction the event was taking place, because several Indians were heading toward it at that very moment. He leapt on to Repetido. He could see where all the Indians were gathered, about two thousand yards away. The tents of the Mapuches’ imperial capital were arranged in loose semicircles that did not obscure the view on any side.
“Can a hare really fly?” Gauna asked him.
“Only if it’s thrown in the air,” he replied crossly. Gauna had an irritating way of asking questions, with a hint of malice in his voice. He must be half Indian, though his yellow, wrinkled face made him look more Chinese.
Their ponies covered the distance in no time. When they arrived, there were more children than adults present, and the latter were busy playing a game of hockey with a ball of rags. Clarke was taken aback. He caught sight of Mallén, one of Cafulcurá’s favorite shamans, sitting quietly on his horse away from the main group, staring down at his fingertips. He rode over to him, followed by Gauna.
“What’s all this about a hare?” Clarke asked him without preamble.
“I know as much as you do. I’ve just got here.”
Typical reply.
“I heard that a hare had taken off,” Clarke insisted.
“If that’s true,” replied Mallén, “it must have done so before I arrived.”
A small group of children close by them were staring up into the sky. Without saying another word to the shaman, Clarke went over to them and asked the same question. It seemed to him that the children were more polite, more rational — presumably because according to Indian standards, they were less so. They told him that yes, a little white hare (they used the same word for “white” as for “twin”) had taken off into the air, and they believed they had spotted it high in the sky. However, after the verb “taken off” they had used an extra word, the Mapuche enclitic (i’n), which served to emphasize the past tense. It could mean “a minute ago,” “a thousand years ago,” or “before.”
This made the whole thing extremely suspect, but Clarke still threw his head back and looked up. For a while, the children tried to give him indications, using the stars as points of reference, since with their keen eyesight they could see them even during the day. Clarke soon gave up. In fact, he could not decide from what they said whether they were talking about a real animal, or a star of the same name. He went back over to Mallén, where Gauna was waiting for him too. Meanwhile, almost everyone had joined in the game of hockey: there must have been a hundred Indians playing, having a whale of a time. The horses galloped in every direction, frequently crashing into each other, to loud cheers from the spectators. In one of these collisions, an Indian was knocked to the ground, and broke his neck. After that, the game quickly petered out. As they were riding back to the camp, Clarke spoke his thoughts out loud:
“I wonder if that tale about the hare was something real, something that really happened, or whether it was some kind of ceremony or ritual?”
Mallén nodded, showing interest, but no desire to express his own opinion on the matter; to him the difference seemed to be negligible, a mere intellectual quibble. In order to say something, he commented:
“Not here, but further south in regions where we once lived, the winds are so strong that no one would be surprised to see a small animal, a hare for example, flying over their head.”
They were joined by a single rider also on his way back to the camp. Mallén greeted him with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, then turned to introduce him.
“Do you two know each other? Alvarito Reymacurá. Mister Clarke from England.”
“Yes, we met yesterday,” said the Indian. He was one of Cafulcurá’s countless children, and a personage of some importance in the court. The son of a giant, he was himself rather small, but he was attractive and had the reputation of being obsessed with sex.
Mallén made some comment about the spectacle they had vainly hoped to witness. Alvarito responded with a brief cackle, although he gave no hint of a smile, which was something the Indians never did.
“How can one see what’s already been, my dear Mallén?”
He must immediately have felt that his comment was out of place, and corrected himself harshly:
“But who cares about that kind of nonsense?”
“Well,” Mallén said with a deep sigh, “if I’m not mistaken, I think our distinguished visitors were quite interested.”
Alvarito corrected himself a second time, turning ninety degrees on the horse’s back as though in a swivel chair, until he was facing directly toward Clarke (though he was staring at the ground). He said:
“Of course, of course! For anyone who has not seen it, it’s of undoubted interest. Even if they never get to see it.”
“It’s disappointing, isn’t it?” said the Englishman.
“No, no, not in the least!”
Mallén was silent. Then he said he had things he must attend to, and tapped his mount on the neck, urging it off in another direction.
“Goodbye,” Alvarito called out to him.
“Be seeing you.”
“I wonder, Mister Clarke, if you would care to come and have a cup of tea at my tent, although I’m afraid it must be in a dreadful mess.”
“I’d love to.”
“And Mister. .”
“Gauna, at your service.”
So Gauna came along too. Alvarito’s tent was nearby, in the first line of the village. As they dismounted, several small grayhounds came to rub themselves against the Indian’s legs. The Indians always left their horses without tying them up, and Clarke decided to do the same.
They went in. All the tents were exactly the same, inside and out. A group of about ten Indians were playing cards in the center of this one.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, friends, but these gentlemen and I would like to talk on our own for a while.”
“Don’t mention it, Alvarito!” one of the men said, picking up the cards without mixing them. “We’ll go over to Felix Barrigón’s.”
And so they left. Soon afterward, two women came in with some rolls of leather, which they spread out on the ground for mats. The three men sat down and the host called for some tea. Once they were settled, Alvarito Reymacurá crossed his eyes in a squint that seemed almost superhuman, and stared down at the ground. This was a sign of great courtesy that few in the village had offered Clarke until now; this made him feel better. They began to talk.
Summing up the various replies Reymacurá gave to the Englishman’s hesitant questions, and stripping them of their many contradictions, vague points, and digressions, what he conveyed was more or less the following:
“As the perspicacious traveler has quite rightly noted from the attitude of the wise shaman, the question about the reality of the hare which caused all the fuss today was irrelevant. It was something which, literally, was of no interest to anyone. To explain why, as indeed to explain any other lack of interest, one must return to general principles, which might seem to bear no relation to the original question. To put it simply, it could be said that for centuries the central political problem for the savages has been that of the discontinuity of territory.” He did not propose to go into details, partly because it was too complicated, and partly because it spoke for itself. What other problem could the wide open spaces of the pampas have, if indeed they had any, apart from that of discontinuity? As a result of many years pondering this problem, the Indians had constructed a whole logic of continuities, and this had to be borne in mind when even the most trifling event took place. The Mapuches were constantly creating continuities, and so adept were they at this that they no longer even needed to employ visible or virtual connections, but simply used the continuity itself to perform that function. “Take for example what happened today,” Alvarito said. “The hare runs, but by definition it must run across territory. If for example it is running on the continent, it cannot be running on the island. But then if it takes off and lands on the other side of the channel separating the continent from the island, then it is doing so, isn’t it? It is like that sad story,” he added, heightening still further the rather stilted mannerisms of his way of talking, “of the Indian who was leading his three-year-old son by the hand in some celebration where there were crowds of people. At one point his attention wandered and he let go of the boy for an instant: when he looked again, he had vanished. The only thing left on the ground close to the despairing father’s feet was the paper windmill the little boy had been carrying. A kidnapping? Fate? He never saw him again.