At summer's end the weather had attained ultimate perfection. The landscapes took on an infinite plasticity; the shifting light of the Cordillera enveloped them hour by hour, made them transparent, endless cascades of detail. The afternoon light, filtered by the imposing stone ramparts of the Andes, was a ghost of its morning self, an optics of the mind, inhabited by the untimely pinks of mid-afternoon.
Twilight went on for ten or twelve hours. And during the friends' night walks, gusts of wind rearranged stars and mountains. If it was true, as the Buddhists said, that everything, even a stone, a dead leaf or a blowfly, had already existed and would exist again, that everything was part of a great cycle of rebirths, then everything was a man, a single man on the scale of time. Any man, Buddha or a beggar, a god or a slave. Given sufficient time, all the elements of the universe would combine to form a man. This had major consequences for the procedure: for a start, it could not operate automatically like a transcendent mechanics, with each fragment being slotted into its predetermined place; each fragment could become any other, and the transformation would be accomplished not in the dimension of time but in that of meaning. This idea could give rise to a totally different conception of reality. In his work, Rugendas had come to the conclusion that the lines of a drawing should not represent corresponding lines in visible reality, in a one-to-one equivalence. On the contrary, the line's function was constructive. That was why the practice of drawing remained irreducible to thought, and why, although he had completely incorporated the procedure, he could continue to draw.
The Godoys had still not grown accustomed to his new appearance. This was an interesting sign of things to come. People can get used to any deformity, even the most frightful, but when it is accompanied by an uncontrollable movement of the features, a fluid, senseless movement, habit has no stable base on which to build. Perception remains correspondingly fluid. Although sociable and talkative by nature, Rugendas began to retire shortly after dinner and spend the evenings on his own. This he could do without awkwardness, since he had a legitimate excuse: struck down by superhuman migraines, he was at first incapable of anything but writhing on the bed of his attic room… and not only the bed, on the floor too, and the walls, and the ceiling…when the medication took effect, he returned to his letters.
In his writing he tried to be absolutely sincere. He reasoned as follows: in principle, telling the truth and lying require the same amount of effort, so why not tell the truth, without omissions or ambiguities? If only as an experiment. But this was easier to say than to do, especially since in this case the doing was a kind of saying.
Perhaps the morphine would never be metabolized. Perhaps he was entering a second or a third phase. Or was the combination of the opiate, the migraines and the nervous meltdown of a physiognomic landscape painter producing an unprecedented result? In any case the concept of truth took on monstrous proportions in his imagination, and rent his nights in the little rooftop room.
The letters from this period are much concerned with an apparently extraneous matter, to which Rugendas returns obsessively, like a monomaniac. His book A Picturesque Voyage through Brazil, the basis of his considerable fame throughout Europe, had in fact been written by someone else, the French journalist and art critic Victor Aimé Huber (1800–1869), using Rugendas's manuscript notes. Although this had not struck him as irregular at the time, it now seemed very odd indeed, and he wondered how he could have consented to such a scheme. Surely it was fraudulent to publish a book under the signature of X when it had in fact been written by Y? He had been so distracted by the whole process of the publication, which was absurdly complicated because of the nature of the book, that he had agreed without thinking. There were so many tasks involved, from financing the project to the coloring of the plates; the writing of the text seemed a mere detail. The lithographs were the book's main attraction: a hundred of them, executed by French artists, except for three, which Rugendas had done himself. Although the lithographers, Engelmann & Co., had a well-deserved reputation as the finest in Europe, he still had to supervise the preparation of the lithographs in person and in minute detail; the process consisted of various stages and was beset with pitfalls. He had thought of the text as an accompaniment to the images; but what he had not seen at the time, and was now beginning to realize, was that by considering it an accompaniment or a complement he was separating the text from the "graphic" content. And the truth, he now saw, was that both were part of the same thing. Which meant that the ghost-writer, the "nègre," had infiltrated the very essence of the work, under the pretext of carrying out a purely technical task: making coherent sentences out of the disjointed scraps of oral documentation. But everything was documentation! That was where it all began and where it ended too. Where it began especially (because the end was far off down the misty ways of science and art history). Nature itself, preformed by the procedure, was already documentation. There were no pure, isolated data. An order was implicit in the phenomenal revelation of the world; the order of discourse shaped things themselves. And since his current mental state was part of that order, he would have to examine it and find rational explanations for what seemed to be a visionary or maniacal chaos. It should be added here that Rugendas was not medicating himself with pure morphine — which could not be synthesized at the time — but with a tincture of opium in a bromide solution. This combined the benefits of the best analgesic and those of the best anti-depressant. His face twitched like a second hand timing an eternity of Buddhist reincarnations. It was one way to cure the "publishing pains" resulting from his past errors of judgement.
Although in their letters the Guttikers kept urging him to return to Chile, the journey across the mountains was repeatedly postponed. He was engrossed in the work of letter-writing and still apprehensive about confronting acquaintances with his new face, while the need for medical attention had become less urgent, partly because his torments had settled into a more or less stable pattern and partly because he was beginning to accept the futility of any treatment. But the preponderant reason for the delay was that conditions in Mendoza at that time of year were ideal for painting. And this, in turn, encouraged the two friends to extend their excursions, in so far as Rugendas's health permitted, always venturing southwards, towards the forests and lakes, where, despite the cold, a mysterious tropical zone of blue light and endless foliage seemed to begin. They would spend the night in San Rafael, a little village ten leagues south of the provincial capital, or at one of the ranches in the area belonging to friends or relatives of the Godoys, and then set off, sometimes for whole days at a time, up winding valleys, in search of views, which they captured in increasingly strange watercolors. After a few such exquisite outings, they could not bear to give them up. The vagueness of the letters Rugendas wrote during those weeks has allowed a legend to spring up, according to which he journeyed far into the south, to regions unexplored by white men, perhaps all the way to the fabled glaciers, shifting mountains of ice, impregnable portals of another world. The field sketches dating from that time lend credence to the myth. They have an air of impossible distance about them. For the legend to be true, Rugendas would have had to fly through the air, like an Immortal, from the known to the unknown. Which is what he was doing all the time, mentally. But for him it was a normal, everyday activity, a mere background for incredible events, anecdotes or episodes.