an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (3 page)

These reflections occupied pages and pages of a letter to his sister Luise in Augsburg, the first letter he wrote from Mendoza.

For suddenly there they were in Mendoza, a pretty town with tree-lined streets, the mountains within arms reach and skies so immutably blue they were boring. It was midsummer; the locals, stunned by the heat, extended their siestas until six in the evening. Luckily the vegetation provided plenty of shade; the foliage filled the air with oxygen, so breathing, when possible, was very restorative.

Armed with letters of introduction from Chilean friends, the travelers stayed at the house of the attentive and hospitable Godoy de Villanueva family. A large house overshadowed by trees, with an orchard and various little gardens. Three generations inhabited the ancestral home in harmony, and the smaller children rode around on tricycles, which Rugendas duly sketched in his notebooks; he had never seen them before. Those were his first Argentinean sketches, portents of an interest in vehicles that would soon develop unexpectedly.

They spent a delightful month in and around Mendoza and its environs. The locals bent over backwards to welcome the distinguished visitor, who, invariably accompanied by Krause, made the obligatory excursions to the ranges (which were no doubt more interesting for travelers who had come from the other direction), toured the neighboring estates and generally began to soak up the spirit of Argentina, so similar to Chile in that town near the border, and yet, even there, so different. Mendoza was, in effect, the starting point for the long eastward voyage across the pampas to the fabled Buenos Aires, and that gave it a special, unique character. Another notable feature was that all the buildings in the town and the surrounding country looked new; and so they were, since earthquakes ensured that all man-made structures were replaced approximately every five years. Rebuilding stimulated the local economy. Comfortably riding the seismic activity, the ranches supplied the Chilean markets, exploiting the early maturation of the cattle, speeded by the dangers emanating from the underworld. Rugendas would have liked to depict an earthquake, but he was told that it was not a propitious time according to the planetary clock. Nevertheless, throughout his stay in the region, he kept secretly hoping he might witness a quake, though he was too tactful to say so. In this respect, and in others, his desires were frustrated. Prosaic Mendoza held promises that, for one reason or another, were not fulfilled and which, in the end, prompted their departure.

His other cherished dream was to witness an Indian raid. In that area, they were veritable human typhoons, but, by their nature, refractory to calendars and oracles. It was impossible to predict them: there might be one in an hour's time or none until next year (and it was only January). Rugendas would have paid to paint one. Every morning of that month, he woke up secretly hoping the great day had come. As in the case of the earthquake, it would have been in poor taste to mention this desire. Dissimulation made him hypersensitive to detail. He was not so sure that there was no forewarning. He questioned his hosts at length, supposedly for professional reasons, about the premonitory signs of seismic activity. It seemed they appeared only hours or minutes before the quake: dogs spat, chickens pecked at their own eggs, ants swarmed, plants flowered, etc. But there was no time to do anything. The painter was convinced that an Indian raid would be anticipated by equally abrupt and gratuitous changes in the cultural domain. But he did not have the opportunity to confirm this intuition.

Despite all the delays they allowed themselves, and their habit of letting nature encourage and justify their lingering, it was time to move on. Not only for practical reasons in this case, but also because, over the years, the painter had gradually constructed a personal myth of Argentina, and after a month spent on the threshold, the pull of the interior was stronger than ever.

A few days before their departure, Emilio Godoy organized an excursion to a large cattle ranch ten leagues south of the town. Among the picturesque sites they visited on the trip was a hilltop from which they had a panoramic view of forests and ranges stretching away to the south. According to their host, it was from those wooded corridors that the Indians usually emerged. They came from that direction, and in pursuit of them, on a punitive expedition after a raid, the ranchers of Mendoza had glimpsed astonishing scenes: mountains of ice, lakes, rivers, impenetrable forests. "That's what you should be painting ..." It was not the first time he had heard this sentence. People had been repeating it for decades, wherever he went. He had learnt to be wary of such advice. How did they know what he should paint? At this point in his career, within reach of the vast emptiness of the pampas, the art most authentically his own was, he felt, drawing him in the opposite direction. In spite of which, Godoy's descriptions set him dreaming. In his imagination, the Indians' realm of ice was more beautiful and mysterious than any picture he was capable of painting.

Meanwhile, what he was capable of painting took a new and rather unexpected, form. In the process of hiring a guide, he came into contact with a supremely fascinating object: the large carts used for journeys across the pampas.

These were contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge. The first time he saw one, he gazed at it intently for a long time. Here, at last, in the cart's vast size, he saw the magic of the great plains embodied and the mechanics of flat surfaces finally put to use. He returned to the loading station the next day and the day after, armed with paper and charcoal. Drawing the carts was at once easy and difficult. He watched them setting off on their long voyages. Their caterpillar's pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week, provoked a flurry of quick sketches, and perhaps this was not such a paradox in the work of a painter known for his watercolors of hummingbirds, since extremes of movement, slow as well as quick, have a dissolving effect. He set aside the problem of the moving carts—there would be plenty of opportunities to observe them in action during the journey—and concentrated on the unhitched ones.

Because they had only two wheels (that was their peculiarity), they tipped back when unloaded and their shafts pointed up at the sky, at an angle of forty-five degrees. The ends of the shafts seemed to disappear among the clouds; their length can be deduced from the fact that they could be used to hitch ten teams of oxen. The sturdy planks were reinforced to bear immense loads; whole houses, on occasion, complete with furniture and inhabitants. The wheels were like fairground Ferris wheels, made entirely of carob wood, with spokes as thick as roof-beams and bronze hubs at the center, laden with pints of grease. To give an idea of the carts' real dimensions, Rugendas had to draw small human figures beside them, and, having eliminated the numerous maintenance workers, he chose the drivers as models: imposing characters, equal to their task, they were the aristocracy of the carting business. Those hyper-vehicles were under their control for very considerable periods of time, not to mention the cargoes, which sometimes comprised all the goods and chattels of a magnate. Surely it would take a lifetime at least to travel in a straight line from Mendoza to Buenos Aires at a rate of two hundred meters per day. The cart drivers were transgenerational men; their gaze and manner were living records of the sublime patience exercised by their predecessors. Turning to more practical matters, it seemed that the key variables were weight (the cargo to be transported) and speed: the less the weight, the greater the speed and vice versa. Obviously the long-haul carters, given the flatness of the pampas, had opted to maximize weight.

And one day, suddenly, the carts set off... A week later, they were still a stone's throw away, but sinking inexorably below the horizon. Rugendas, as he informed his friend, was possessed by an urgent, almost infantile desire to depart in their wake. He felt it would be like traveling in time: proceeding rapidly on horseback along the same route, they would catch up with carts that had set off in other geological eras, perhaps even before the inconceivable beginning of the universe (he was exaggerating), overtaking them all on their journey towards the truly unknown.

They set off on that trail. Following that line. A straight line leading all the way to Buenos Aires. What mattered to Rugendas, however, was not at the end of the line but at its impossible midpoint. Where something would, he thought, finally emerge to defy his pencil and force him to invent a new procedure.

The Godoys bid him farewell most affectionately. Would he come back one day? they asked. Not according to his itinerary: from Buenos Aires he would proceed to Tucuman, and from there he would head north to Bolivia and Peru, before eventually returning to Europe, after a voyage of several years ... But perhaps one day he would retrace his South American journey in reverse (a poetic idea that came to him on the spur of the moment): once again he would see all that he was seeing now, speak all the words he was speaking, encounter the smiling faces before him, identical, not a day younger or older ... His artist's imagination figured this second voyage as the other wing of a vast, mirrored butterfly.

They took an old guide, a boy to cook for them, five horses and two little mares (they had finally managed to get rid of the grumpy mules). The weather, still hot, became drier. In a week of unhurried progress, they left behind trees, rivers and birds, as well as the foothills of the Andes. A ruse against Orphic disobedience: obliterate all that lies behind. There was no point turning around anymore. On the plains, space became small and intimate, almost mental. To give their procedure time to adjust, they abstained from painting. Instead they engaged in almost abstract calculations of the distance covered. Every now and then they overtook a cart, and psychologically it was as if they had leapt months ahead.

They adapted to the new routine. A series of slight bumps indicated their way across the flat immensity. They began to hunt systematically. The guide entertained them with stories at night. He was a mine of information about the region's history. For some reason (no doubt because they were not practicing their art), Rugendas and Krause, in their daily conversations on horseback, hit upon a relation between painting and history. It was a subject they had discussed on many previous occasions. But now they felt they were on the point of tying up all the loose ends of their reasoning.

One thing they had agreed about was the usefulness of history for understanding how things were made. A natural or cultural scene, however detailed, gave no indication of how it had come into being, the order in which its components had appeared or the causal chains that had led to that particular configuration. And this was precisely why man surrounded himself with a plethora of stories: they satisfied the need to know how things had been made. Now, taking this as his starting point, Rugendas went one step further and arrived at a rather paradoxical conclusion. He suggested, hypothetically, that, were all the storytellers to fall silent, nothing would be lost, since the present generation, or those of the future, could experience the events of the past without needing to be told about them, simply by recombining or yielding to the available facts, although, in either case, such action could only be born of a deliberate resolution. And it was even possible that the repetition would be more authentic in the absence of stories. The purpose of storytelling could be better fulfilled by handing down, instead, a set of "tools," which would enable mankind to reinvent what had happened in the past, with the innocent spontaneity of action. Humanity's finest accomplishments, everything that deserved to happen again. And the tools would be stylistic. According to this theory, then, art was more useful than discourse.

A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should be at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.

It was a delicate balance, like their artistic procedure. Once again Rugendas regretted not having seen the Indians in action. Perhaps they should have waited a few more days ... He felt a vague, inexplicable nostalgia for what had not happened, and the lessons it might have taught him. Did that mean the Indians were part of the procedure? The repetition of their raids was a concentrated form of history.

Rugendas kept delaying the beginning of his task, until one day he discovered that he had more reasons for doing so than he had realized. A casual remark made beside the campfire provoked a rectification from the old guide: No, they were not yet in the renowned Argentinean pampas, although the country they were crossing was very similar. The real pampas began at San Luis. The guide thought they had simply misunderstood the word. And in a sense, they must have, the German reflected, but the thing itself was involved as well; it had to be. He questioned the guide carefully, testing his own linguistic resources. Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane? And yet the old guide assured him that it was so, with a satisfied smile rarely to be seen among the members of his grave company. Rugendas discussed this point at length with Krause later on, as they smoked their cigars under the starry sky. After all, he had no good reason to doubt the guide. If the pampas existed (and there was no good reason to doubt that either), they lay some distance ahead. After three weeks of assimilating a vast, featureless plain, to be told of a more radical flatness was a challenge to the imagination. It seemed, from what they could understand of the old hand's scornful phrases, that, for him, the current leg of the journey was rather "mountainous." For them, it was like a well-polished table, a calm lake, a sheet of earth stretched tight. But with a little mental effort, now that they had been alerted, they saw that it might not be so. How odd, and how interesting! Needless to say their arrival in San Luis, which was imminent according to the expert, became the object of eager anticipation. For the two days following the revelation they pressed on steadily. They started seeing hills everywhere, as if produced by a conjurer's trick: the ranges of El Monigote and Agua Hedionda. On the third day they came to expanses resonant with emptiness. The sinister nature of the surroundings made an impression on the Germans, and, to their surprise, on the Gauchos too. The old man and the boy talked in whispers, and the man dismounted on a number of occasions to feel the soil. They noticed that there was no grass, not the least blade, and the thistles had no leaves: they looked like coral. Clearly the region was drought stricken. The earth crumbled at a touch, yet a layer of dust did not seem to have formed, although they could not be sure, because the wind had dropped to nothing. In the mortal stillness of the air, the sounds of the horses' hooves, their own words and even their breathing were accompanied by menacing echoes. From time to time they noticed that the old guide was straining anxiously to hear something. It was contagious; they started listening too. They could hear nothing, except perhaps the faint hint of a buzzing that must have been mental. The guide clearly suspected something, but a vague fear prevented them from questioning him.