an Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira

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