The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (3 page)

Of course they were hoping to see the exotic and
picturesque part of the operation, the grotesque magical ritual, the touch of
the ridiculous that they would know how to draw attention to, the blunder they
would publicize in the tabloids, the failure. And of course he would not give
them that pleasure.

Because all of this was the same as a medical “hidden
camera,” the difference being that they could no longer catch him off guard;
they had already tried so many times that all they could do was risk “hiding the
hidden,” hoping to slip it in between levels.

He watched them talk, his attention waxing and waning at
irregular intervals, as a result of which the two enthusiastic and youthful —
almost frenetic — faces he had so close to his began to seem unreal. And they
were, he had no doubt about this, though only up to a certain point; because
they did belong to two human beings of flesh and blood. The intensive use of
hidden cameras in the last few years (in order to pull off all kinds of pranks,
but also to catch corrupt officials, dishonest businessmen, tax evaders, and
criminal infiltrators into the medical profession) required using up actors at a
phenomenal rate, for they could never be employed a second time because of the
risk of blowing their cover. They had to always be new, debutants; they couldn’t
have appeared on any screen ever before, not even as extras, because given the
high degree of distrust that had infiltrated society, the least hint of
recognition was enough to ruin the operation. And that same, constantly
increasing distrust forced actors to be constantly getting better, more
believable. It was astonishing that they didn’t run out of them; of course, they
didn’t need to be professionals (with the new Labor Contract Law, they were not
strictly required to be members of the union), but in cases where a lot was at
stake, it must have required a difficult decision to place the success or
failure of an operation in the hands of an amateur.

These two were really good; they not only handled the
jargon perfectly but they even had the gestures, tics, bearing, and voices of
doctors . . . Perhaps they were doctors who were collaborating with Actyn out of
conviction; in that case, they were new recruits, because Dr. Aira knew all the
original fanatics. Actyn had the necessary prestige and charisma to keep
acquiring new adherents to his cause, which he called the cause of Reason and
Decency. But it was a fact that doctors were also human beings, subject to the
vicissitudes of incurable diseases, and whoever got “burned” in front of Dr.
Aira would then be unable to use his services, even if the case was desperate.
Hence Actyn’s only option was to seek active supporters among the ranks of the
youngest doctors, those who would least consider their personal risk. This
explained why these two were so young.

Of course there was also the possibility that this was a
real case. A very remote possibility, one in a million, yet it persisted as a
pure possibility, lost among all the possibilities. In a different era, before
these cursed spy technologies had been perfected, it would have been the
opposite: the possibility that this was a performance would have been so
improbable that he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea; in those days,
whatever happened was inevitably considered real. But there was no point in
lamenting the good old days, because historical circumstances formed a block:
everything would have been different in days gone by; you wouldn’t have been
able to record a blunder in order to broadcast it
urbi et orbi
, but
miracles were accepted as a matter of course, because the precise boundary
between what was and was not a miracle had not yet been established.

If he could trust in the existence of true symmetry, he
might be able to hope, now that this boundary had been clearly drawn, that the
corresponding boundary — the one that divided blunders from what were not
blunders — would begin to dissolve.

Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and
without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might
have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts
were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower
against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to
stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took
every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct
confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye,
condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never
achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure
was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success.
He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that
justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of
nothingness . . . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had
been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had
gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with
the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible,
intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap
didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another
one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He
could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped,
and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book
supervillains, who never pursues anything less than world domination . . . the
only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that
was at stake.

But, according to the law of the circle, everything flowed
into its opposite, and the lie moved in a great curve toward the truth, theater
toward reality . . . The authentic, the spontaneous, were on the reverse side of
these transparencies.

Be that as it may, the ambulance kept driving, the dog
kept barking like crazy at the wheels (the sound waves of the siren, which
continued wailing, must have carried the ultrasound frequency of the television
broadcast, which the animal perceived), and the two dimwits kept holding forth.
Now their alternating discourses focused on the patient — his personal
circumstances, his history. How had that poor devil ended up in the state he was
in? In the usual way, one any doctor could discover on a daily basis in the
majority of the population: an unnatural diet and the exacerbation of the
passions. This was the deadly duo that caused more premature deaths than war.
Dr. Aira was struck by this old-fashioned and solemn vocabulary, but he
reflected that this anachronism was enough to suggest a second interpretation on
the next level into which everything would be translated if he succumbed: the
“deadly duo” would turn into the abuse of minors and the enthusiasm for
televised soccer.

In any case, whatever they were saying served no purpose
other than as visual backup for the dubbing they would add subsequently to the
film. It might even have been planned in order to provoke from him certain
responses that in the dubbed version would become replicas of other sentences;
because the only voice they wouldn’t dub over would be his, but they could
radically change the meaning based on the context, which they did plan to
change.

One concept was repeated more often than the others:
“vegetative state.” In fact, the organism had already passed into the realm of
brainlessness, after which all that remained was to continue to exist, no longer
act, only react to the environment; at this point it could absorb only the
effect of the medicine, without any further possibility of assimilating it in
order to transform its effects. Of course, the phrase could be erased from the
tape, but if it was uttered in the ambulance it was in order to provoke a
certain response. Actyn must have been aware of his conversations with trees
(how did he find out, the rascal?) and was attacking on that flank.

He was reminded of an episode in an old gothic novel: a
monk with apostatizing tendencies demanded a miracle in order to remain in the
monastery, an impossible condition for he was sure there would be no miracle.
His interlocutor told him that if it was necessary, God would produce a miracle
to keep him in the fold, and he told him to suggest one. They were sitting in
the monastery garden, at the foot of a majestic tree . . . The monk, somewhat at
random, said he wanted “this tree to dry up.” Needless to say, the next morning
the tree was desiccated (the monks, true infernal Actynes, used a lethal
chemical). Dr. Aira, that impenitent flaneur, would have asked to “dry up all
the trees in Buenos Aires,” the entire forest of strange crisscrossing lines he
got lost in on a daily basis. And the miracle could occur! Or directly did occur
. . . After all, they were at the end of autumn.

He startled.

“Hey!”

Where were they? Where were they taking him? Had they gone
mad? Would desperation have led Actyn to seriously consider violence? José
Bonifacio Street kept going, on and on, always in a straight line . . .
Everybody thought the streets of Buenos Aires actually continued beyond the city
limits, into the countryside, there turning into the streets of faraway towns,
then again continuing into the countryside . . . Past the small windows, which
he looked through out of the corner of his eye so as not to take his eyes off
the two little doctors, he glimpsed an infinite expanse, which must have been
the Pampa. If it was, something had happened, something far beyond a joke.
Nothing could be more realistic or more normal than a straight line, but
following it one could also move into the marvelous. He had a miniature vision
inside his head: the ambulance driving through an infinite and empty desert, and
the dog running alongside the wheel, barking . . . Finally he spoke,
interrupting some elaborate nonsensical explanation in mid sentence — and they
stopped talking, because this is what they wanted: for him to talk.

“The answer is no.”

“No what, doctor?”

“I’m not going to do anything for this man, or for anybody
else. I never have and you know that very well.”

“But your gift, Dr. Aira . . . The Miracle Cures . . .
”

“No cures or curates, and no monks, either. I have no idea
what you’re talking about.”

“What do you mean, you have no idea? So why are you
famous? Why do all the terminal cases beg for you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never . . . ”

“Is it an invention of the media? Why did we spend half
the morning looking for you, wasting time we could have spent performing brain
surgery? You’re not going to tell us we’ve been duped.”

“I’ve got nothing to do with it. I want to get out.”

They suddenly changed tactics. The screens all turned red
and began to emit blood-curdling beeps (surely they had secretly pushed some
button). They threw themselves over the stretcher, shouting:

“A systemic collapse! He’s failing! There’s nothing
to be done!”

In spite of their pessimism, they worked like the devil,
shouting at each other, even swearing, all in an attack of hysteria. They
applied electric paddles to the poor man, who was turning blue, seizing,
writhing. The odor of strange chemical substances made it impossible to breathe.
At the same time, the huge nurse stepped on the gas, as if he’d also been
infected, and shouted incoherent orders over the siren’s loudspeakers. Even the
dog was going nuts. In the midst of this indescribable chaos, Ferreyra turned to
him and shouted:

“Dr. Aira, this is our last chance. Do something! Save a
life!”

“No, no . . . I have never . . . ”

“Do something! We’re losing him!”

He was groping behind him for the door handle. He had
decided to throw himself out the door, if necessary while still in motion. Again
they changed tactics. Suddenly, all the screens went blank, and everybody calmed
down, as if by magic.

“We’ll take you home, don’t worry. The patient has
died.”

“You’re going to have to sign a form . . . ”

“No.”

“ . . . to explain the use of the ambulance.”

“I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“Okay, good-bye.”

They had stopped. They opened the door. As he was getting
out, the dead man said:

“Jackass.”

He could have sworn it was Actyn’s voice, which he’d only
ever heard on television. He stepped onto the sidewalk and looked around. The
dog had disappeared, and the ambulance had already taken off, accelerating
loudly. It was only at that moment that he felt a wave of adrenaline washing
over his insides. This lag, like jet lag, had rendered him ineffectual, for the
chance to beat the hell out of those charlatans had already passed. The same
thing always happened to him: his indignation, which was torturous, came
afterwards when he was alone, when he couldn’t fight with anybody but himself.
Always the same concatenation between time and blunders. A civilized person like
him couldn’t lament not having engaged in a knock-down-drag-out, but there
remained a question about whether he was a Real Man or a scurrying rat. He was
two blocks away from his house. He looked at the trees, the large banana trees
along José Bonifacio Street, and it occurred to him that they were machines
designed to crush the world until the atoms were released. That’s how he felt,
and this was the natural effect of theater. Who said that lies lead to the
truth, that fiction flows into reality? Theater’s misfortune was this definitive
and irreversible dissolution. That was also its gravity, above and beyond the
iridescent lightness of fiction.

At least he’d come out of it unscathed. His morning
adventure was over. Once again, Dr. Aira had escaped from the clutches of his
relentless archenemy and could continue (but for how much longer?) his program
of Miracle Cures.