Clarke had taken the same direction as the day before, riding upstream, which seemed to be the one people preferred. But he went a long way with no sign of the young painter. The groups of Indians began to get scarcer, apart from an occasional fisherman dozing to the sound of the birds. Clarke gave up hope of finding Prior in this direction. Perhaps he hadn’t even come to the stream. If he didn’t find him now, he would have to ask their hosts for help, although they seemed to have forgotten he even existed. There was also the possibility that the opposite was true, and that they were keeping Prior shut up somewhere.
Whatever the case, Clarke gave up the search. He found himself alone on a kind of grassy beach, surrounded by overhanging trees. He dismounted, removed Repetido’s saddle and led the horse into the water, making sure beforehand to take off his boots and trousers. The cool sensation of the current immediately gave him a feeling of calm. Repetido drank his fill, then stood quietly with the water halfway up his legs. Clarke was sorry he did not have a bucket to wash the animal with. He cupped his hands and splashed water onto the horse until it was completely wet. What he did have, in one of his fine red leather saddlebags, was a brush, and he set to work energetically. Clarke had always adored horses, and this one General Rosas had lent him was a fine beast. Serenity in a living being is always an admirable quality. He wondered what it was about horses that made everyone admire their beauty. Could it be merely habit? For someone who had never seen a horse, could it seem like a repugnant monster? He could not imagine such a person.
It was the empty hour of the afternoon. A bird sang above his head. The swishing of the brush and the murmur of the water round his feet dulled his senses: He could hear the cry of a lapwing in the distance. . the horse snorting, the monotonous chirrup of the crickets. .
When he had finished the grooming as well as he could without soap, Clarke sat on the bank to smoke a pipe. Repetido left the stream and began to browse on some weeds. Clarke thought how good it would have been to have a cup of coffee with his pipe. He tried for a while not to think of his problems, nor of the Indians at all. That the Indians had become part of his problem was nothing more than a stroke of bad luck. His chief concern was Nature, or should be anyway. Apart from a couple of fat Indian women who had appeared while he was washing the horse, had stared at him for a moment, then gone back to wherever they had come from, nobody passed by. Clarke wondered if he was at the far end of the Indians’ bathing area. As he thought about it, he became curious to see what lay beyond. Considered as a line of water that dissected the plain, the stream was a homogeneous whole, whose attractions were interchangeable, but moving along it, it changed without changing, in direct proportion to the distance traveled.
Clarke stood up and, just as he was, without shoes or trousers, walked on about a hundred yards. A different aspect of the stream and its banks presented itself to him, novel despite being vaguely predictable. It was a kind of reworking of the same elements: water, the riverbanks, trees, grass. Fascinated, he walked on further, in the midst of complete silence. All the charm of the place lay in its linear aspect, the way each of its segments was hidden from the previous one: the very opposite of what happened out on the open plain. As he had thought, there was no one around. Even the distant sounds of voices and noises he had heard from time to time on the little beach no longer reached him. The river was a series of secret chambers, following on from each other as in an Italian palace. As he crossed a number of “thresholds,” the mechanism of increasing distance led Clarke to feel he was entering a world of mystery, a self-contained nothingness that invoked the infinite.
All of a sudden, he heard something: a quiet, stifled moan, a kind of private crying that was directed at no one in particular, but which had something of a call for help about it. It came from beyond him: to reach it, Clarke would have to cross into another invisible zone. He did so, and was transfixed with shock. All alone on the riverbank sat Carlos Alzaga Prior. He was weeping disconsolately, his head in his hands.
The sight came as a great surprise to the Englishman. He couldn’t recall ever having seen a man cry. It was true the watercolor painter was still almost a child, but there was something adult and definitive about his sobbing that touched Clarke deeply. He was confronting pain, and this brought out a feeling of nostalgia in him — although that was hardly a strong enough word to describe the mixture of anxiety and distress it caused him.
It was as if Clarke saw the youth cut out in a vacuum, in silhouette. Despair produces this kind of vacuum around one. Robbed of all points of reference, the figure could have been either near or far away: he could be a thousand leagues off, and be a giant, or only five inches away, and be a miniature. But he was only a few yards away, and Clarke had to trust to his eyesight, to the normal correlation of size and distance. This inevitability made the scene a cruel one. He thought he saw before him an emblem of his own life, and it terrified him. The terror came from being English, educated, reserved, from being unable to cry in public (or in private), from living inside a bubble and not allowing himself to feel any emotions. His emotional life had dried up years earlier — when in the first flush of his own youth, he had lost someone he loved who might have taught him how to cry. From that day on, he had never felt the sense of dread that is a natural part of life: he could see this now, when he was least expecting it, but in someone else.
His first impulse was to turn and run, but he thought better of it. He went closer. As he had no boots on, he got all kinds of thorns and sharp stones stuck in the soles of his feet. Carlos neither looked up, nor took his hands from his face, nor stopped crying for a second. Overcome with pity, Clarke put his arm round his shoulder. When he tried to speak, words failed him. He wanted to console the boy, but did not know how to. The most natural thing seemed to him to take Prior somewhere else, to go and fetch his horse at least, to get on with his plans and forget about the Indians. He wanted to concentrate on one thing and forget the other. His mind was in such a confused state, however, that the two impulses became entangled.
All the same, the youth allowed himself to be led along a few steps without protesting, sobbing all the while. They had hardly gone a few yards when a shadow fell across them. Clarke was the only one who lifted his gaze. A horseman stood out against the setting sun, mysterious as yet, slightly threatening because of his position above them and because he had stopped and was staring at them. “What’s he going to think?” Clarke immediately wondered. The lugubrious voice that rang out clearly showed him that it wasn’t a question of thinking anything.
“I was looking for you.”
It was the voice of Mallén the shaman. A voice from beyond the grave, filled with concern: the voice of a man with a serious problem. Clarke let go of the youth and stepped to one side so that Mallén would not be against the light. He was taken aback by his face: he seemed to have aged twenty years in a single day.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to talk to you.”
He used none of the usual circumlocutions. The Englishman realized the seriousness of the situation, and did not keep him waiting.
“All right, I’ll get properly dressed.” Then to Carlos: “I’ll be back right away.” He walked on a few steps, but then felt the need to add something more, so said: “Try to calm down.”