The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (5 page)

Writing was something he couldn’t do in a single block,
all at once. He had to keep doing it, if at all possible, every day in order to
establish a rhythm . . . The rhythm of publication, so checkered due to the
imponderables of the material aspects, could be regularized through the
installment format, which also took care of the quantity of the product and its
basic tone, that of “disclosure.” These symbolic rhythms materialized when they
were used as a framework for the rhythm at which things actually occurred. For
in the meantime, life, both public and private, was continuing, and this
andante cantabile
system prevented real life from transpiring as a
marginal event; through this rhythm it recovered not only the general flow but
also each and every anecdotal detail, even the most heterogeneous ones. In this
way he could be sure he wouldn’t miss anything, nor would he fail to fully
utilize anything. An episode like the one with the ambulance, which had left him
very perturbed (so much so that it had been one of the triggers, along with his
financial good fortune, for deciding to move into action), ceased to be merely
one more “example” of Dr. Actyn’s persecution of him, and became a particularity
of the Universe of facts where there were no hierarchies or generalizations.

Given these characteristics of Dr. Aira’s method, the
publication would have to be encyclopedic. And although the word “Encyclopedic”
should never be written down, the open-ended and infinite totality of
installments was nothing but a general and complete Encyclopedia. Therein lay
the secret of the Cures, the secret he was aiming for, and therein lay the key
to his entire enterprise: to give it maximum visibility.

Seen from this angle — as the penning of an Encyclopedia
of all things from all times — the work revealed itself as the ascetic practice
of a Superman . . . There was so much to do! His life would have to last a
thousand years . . . One of the ideas he had discarded in the course of his
fanciful planning was to adapt the format of false publicity brochures selling
prepaid access to healers. A lifelong monthly fee would allow members to benefit
from a Miracle Cure whenever they might need one. Like all the other projects he
was enthusiastic about briefly then dropped as soon as cold reason snuffed out
the flames of his fantasy, this one had not passed without leaving its mark.
Everything fit into the text, which was made of marks, and not only human
marks.

Basically, the discipline of writing consisted of limiting
oneself to writing, to that work, with all its parsimony, its periodicity, its
use of time. It was the only way to quell the anxiety that could otherwise
overwhelm him, anxiety due to the immeasurable and self-propagating nature of
the things that filled the world and continued to emerge each and every step of
the way. There was a contrast, which could be defined as “curative,” between the
constant periodicity of writing, which was always a partial process, and the
totality of the present and of eternity.

For many years it had been Dr. Aira’s habit to write in
cafés, of which, fortunately, there were many in the Flores neighborhood. This
unfortunate habit had combined with several practical imperatives until, during
this period, he couldn’t write a single line unless he was sitting at a table at
one of those hospitable establishments. The viciousness with which Dr. Actyn
carried out his campaign against him put to the test his will to continue to
frequent them, for they were public places, accessible to him as well as to his
enemies. But he had no choice if he wanted to keep writing. A dark cloud of
paranoia began to accompany him during each one of his outings. At moments he
felt observed, and with good reason. There were no direct assaults, nor did he
expect them. But indirect ones could take many forms, and during these writing
sessions on the Camino Real or on Miraflores or San José streets, anything could
happen, or could be happening without him noticing, while one of his frequent
raptures of inspiration was isolating him from his surroundings. He was certain
that Actyn could recruit any type of human, any formulation of the human, for
his operations of vigilance and provocation; hence it was not a question of
recognizing his adversary by his looks . . . He could not even say, just by
looking, if somebody was observing him, because in a café it is easy to sit in a
strategic position, avert the eyes, or stare at a reflection — dissemble in a
thousand ways. He had developed at least one sure method for finding out if
somebody was observing him: it consisted of yawning while secretly spying on the
one he suspected; if he yawned in turn, it meant his eyes had been on him,
because the contagious property of yawns is infallible. Of course, somebody who
just happened to be looking at him at that moment might have yawned; and anyway,
proof didn’t do him much good, though at least he knew what to expect, which was
enough for him.

Among the “practical imperatives” that forced him to go
elsewhere to write was his wife’s superstitious disdain for his intellectual
activities, disdain that had been slowly turning into horror ever since Dr.
Actyn had mobilized the mass media in his campaign to destroy his prestige. More
and more frequently she made a fuss, complaining that people recognized her,
that they stared and pointed; she claimed that soon she would be too ashamed to
leave her house . . . She said it didn’t bother him because he could always pick
up and leave, as had so many other husbands who had gotten carried away. It
didn’t take much, not even an increase in hysteria. All a sweet young thing had
to do was walk past him and he’d fall in love . . . In fact, he wanted to love.
His poor health no longer seemed like an obstacle. In fact, he wanted to love in
sickness; suddenly this seemed to be the only true love.

Thinking about this, he asked himself a question: Why
hadn’t Dr. Actyn, who had tried his hand at so many options, ever considered
tempting him with a woman? He had set him so many traps that were so baroque, so
elaborate, sometimes quite absurd . . . but never the simplest and most classic.
It couldn’t be due to ethical qualms, because he had done much worse things. Was
this not, then, the decisive proof of reality? How could he possibly have failed
to take that into account? Did he have too much respect for him? Did he consider
him above such temptations? If so, how wrong he was! Because Dr. Aira’s thirst
for love made this the temptation he was most likely to succumb to. He was
perfectly capable of falling into that trap, even if he knew it to be a trap,
because he trusted in the power of love. Would it not have been the perfect
romance, the valiant adventure that would make manifest all his fantasies in the
material world? In fact, he thought that losing that battle would be the same as
winning the war. But for some incomprehensible reason, Actyn had abstained from
attacking him along that flank. Did he fear that the missile of love would end
up piercing him? Or was he saving it for when all else had failed?

Without love, Dr. Aira was condemned to perpetual
installments . . . But he had to think positively and concentrate specifically
on the practical aspects. With the arrival of the winter solstice, he felt he
had reached the point of no return. He should already be making models of the
installments, drawing the diagrams, choosing the typeface, the paper . . . They
would be installments, that was settled . . . But in hardcover. He could be
reasonable, but not to such an extent; some of his madness must survive. He had
considered a thick, very stiff cardboard for the covers that would make a nice
contrast with the small number of pages they would contain, though he still
hadn’t decided if there would be four or eight, but no more than that.

Nor had he figured out the costs. He would, needless to
say, have to spend the minimum amount possible; in fact, he couldn’t talk about
“costs” because there would be nothing to offset them, that is, against which to
measure them. The project didn’t include selling the installments; to do that he
would have to set up a company, register as a publisher, pay value-added tax,
and a thousand other things he would never dream of doing. He would give them
away; nobody could stop him from doing that.

The ideal thing would have been to operate with a dual
monetary system, such as the one in Ancient China. There, they had official
money for ordinary citizens and another for the poor, who were, of course, the
vast majority of the population. The connection between the two, which never
played out in reality, consisted of dividing the smallest unit of the official
money — let’s say, a cent — into ten thousand units; that multiple was the
sapek
, the basic unit in the poor people’s system. A fistful of
watermelon seeds cost a
sapek
. All business in the impoverished sectors
was conducted with this money; the poor, the peasants, and children used no
other, and these humble transactions met their survival needs. There was never
any “exchange” because who would ever collect a million
sapeks
to
exchange for one “cent” of the official money, a unit that had, on the other
hand and on another level of life, a minute value, not even enough to pay for
the cheapest item in a store, or the simplest dish in a restaurant? Whereas with
much less money than that — under certain circumstances, a mere hundred
sapeks
! — a poor person could pay an entire month’s food, shelter,
and all other necessities. And everybody was happy and well fed.

III

Even for people
who lead a routine life without incident, for those who are sedentary and
methodical, who have renounced adventure and planned their future, a colossal
surprise is waiting in the wings, one that will take place when the moment
arises and force them to start over again on a different basis. That surprise
consists of the discovery that they are, in reality, one thing or another; in
other words, that they embody one human type — for example, a Miser, or a
Genius, or a Believer, or anything else — a type that until then they have only
known through portrayals in books, portrayals they’ve never truly taken
seriously, and in any case have never seriously considered applying to reality.
This revelation is inevitable at a certain point in life, and the upheaval it
creates (gaping mouth, wide eyes, stupor), the sensation of a personal End of
the World, of “the thing I most feared is happening to me,” is tailor-made to
the frivolity of everything that preceded it.

There’s no set age, as we know: everything depends on
individual variables, which all variables are because the process of living is
nothing but their accumulation. But it usually happens around fifty, which these
days is the time when one begins to think that everything is over. In the
subsequent psychic reshuffling, the horrified victim has an additional reason to
feel bitter when he realizes that this discovery will no longer do him any good,
that it is now a useless cruelty; if it had happened thirty or forty years
before, he would have lived knowing it; he would have boarded the train of the
real.

And this happens even when — especially when — the
aforementioned subject has spent his life identified with the human type he
later discovers he belongs to. In fact, in those cases the surprise turns out to
be more disruptive and creates a deeper impression.

This is what had happened to Dr. Aira during this period.
It would have happened to him anyway because the time had come, but the fact is
that the revelation was unleashed by an incident that interrupted his publishing
project before he had had a chance to begin it.

He received a call, which resulted in him attending a
rather secret meeting in an elegant suite of offices in Puerto Madero . . . and
contrary to all his expectations he found himself embarked on the process of a
Miracle Cure. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to swear that he’d
never do it, that he was already past all temptation, that he had it beaten. His
decision to publish installments had emerged precisely from his conviction that
he’d left behind the call to practice. But, as we can see, man proposes and God
disposes.

The people who contacted him were the brothers of an
important businessman, the president of a petroleum holding company with vast
influence on industry and finance, who had been unexpectedly stricken with a
terminal illness. He was under sixty and of course didn’t want to die, not yet.
Nobody wants to. Human beings always cling to life, whatever the circumstances,
and whether or not it is worth it. In the case of such a wealthy man, with so
many possibilities of squeezing the most out of each day, the desire to prolong
life burgeoned. The brothers tried, in their own way, to explain this to Dr.
Aira, as if to justify themselves. Circumscribed by their professions and their
education, they expressed it in their own terms: the holding company had
embarked with great success on a process of privatization; it was one of a
select group of local businesses that had managed to broaden its field of
operations by reorganizing its assets. They were diversifying without losing
strength and were on the verge of realizing the benefits of consolidation, the
incorporation of Mercosur, the export stimulus, the retrofitting of their
industrial plants with the latest technologies . . . They got excited as they
were describing it, even though it was obvious they were repeating a speech they
had learned by heart, and it was no less obvious that they were reciting it to a
total layman. A bit embarrassed, they returned to the subject at hand,
suggesting that they were not singing their own praises but rather those of
their sick brother, the brains and engine behind the group’s entire operation,
the natural head of the family. What they wanted to emphasize was the
unacceptable injustice that he of all people would have to depart before seeing
the fruits of his talents, his creativity in the business world, his boundless
energy.

Dr. Aira’s head was crackling, as if it were full of soda.
He was also slightly embarrassed for having paid such close attention to the
explanations, and he wanted to get back to the purpose of his being there. What
was the illness? he asked. Cancer, regrettably. Cancer of everything. Large
spreading masses, metastasis, the disease’s uncontrollable growth. They pointed
to a file on the glass desktop.

“All the paperwork is there, including his clinical
history, up-to-date as of today. Though we suppose you don’t work along those
lines. It documents the failure of the best oncologists in the country and
around the world. They no longer even bother to pretend to hold out any hope at
all.”

“How long do they give him?”

“Weeks. Days.”

They had waited a long time to come to him. Anyway, it was
impossible. They had probably begun alternative treatments months ago, and all
available charlatans and healers must have already filed through. He felt
paradoxically flattered to be the last one. They apologized with vague lies,
unaware of how unnecessary it was to do so: their brother had undergone the
conventional treatments with admirable stoicism; he had not given up even in the
face of the most adverse outcomes . . . Finally, he had given them permission to
try the Miracle Cure, and, as he had done from the very beginning, he was
bringing all his faith, all his trust into play: Dr. Aira could count on
that.

There was nothing more to say. He looked at the file and
shook his head as if to say: I don’t need this; I know what awaits me. The truth
was, he would have liked to take a peek, just out of curiosity, though he would
not have understood anything because surely every entry was in medical jargon,
which was inaccessible to him. Moreover, it was true that he didn’t need it
because his intervention occurred on a different level. The case had to be shut
in order for him to come on stage; the clinical history had to have reached its
end. And by all appearances, this is what had happened with this man.

The next step: he accepted the mission. Why? In spite of
all his promises and precautions, he took the plunge. Once again, the well-known
saying proved true: “Never say never.” He vowed he would never do it (his
interlocutors must not have known about this vow because they took his
acceptance as a matter of course), and now he rushed to say yes, almost before
they had finished making their proposal. This could be explained a priori by a
defect in his personality, which had caused him many problems throughout his
life: he didn’t know how to say no. A basic insecurity, a lack of confidence in
his own worth, prevented him from doing so. This became more pronounced and more
plausible because the people who had requested his services on the basis of his
capabilities and talents were, by definition, unfamiliar with his field, and
little or poorly informed about his worth and his history. Hence, a refusal on
his part would leave them totally blank, thinking, “Who does this guy think he
is, playing hard to get like this? Why did we bother to call him?” It was as if
he could only refuse those who were fully informed about his system, those who
had already entered his system, and by definition such people would never ask
him for a Cure, or they wouldn’t ask him for one in earnest.

There was an additional motive, related to the previous
one, and the result of another defect, one that was quite common but very
pronounced in Dr. Aira: snobbery. This office with its Picassos and its Persian
carpets had impressed him, and the opportunity to enter into contact with such a
first-rate celebrity was irresistible. It’s true that until that day he had
never heard of this man, and the family name was totally unfamiliar to him. But
that only magnified the effect. He knew there were very important people who
maintained a “low profile” policy. And it had to have been really low to go
unnoticed by a snob of his caliber. An unknown celebrity was as if on another —
a higher — level.

But before all that, and as if obscured under a leaf
storm of circumstantial and psychological motives, his acceptance had a much
more concrete cause: it was the first time he had been asked. Like so many other
phenomena in our era dominated by media fiction, his fame had preceded him. His
own myth surrounded him, and the myth’s mechanism had continually delayed him
from going into action, until there came a point when doing so had become
inconceivable. These wealthy barbarians had to come along with their ignorance
of the subtle mechanism of the esoteric for the unthinkable to occur. In fact,
Dr. Aira could have gotten out of it by telling them that there had been a
mistake, a misunderstanding; he was a theoretician, one could almost say a
“writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of
metaphor . . . At the same time, however, it was not a metaphor; it was real,
and its truth resided in this reality. This would be his first and perhaps last
chance to prove it.

They wanted to know when he could begin the procedure.
They felt a certain urgency due to the very nature of the problem: there was no
time to lose. They managed to include in their proposal a discreet query about
the nature of his method, of which they obviously had not the slightest idea
(this was obvious, above all, because nobody did).

Swept into the vortex of the blind impulse that had led
him to accept the job, Dr. Aira said he needed a little time to prepare.

“Let’s see . . . Today is . . . I don’t know what day it
is.”

“Friday.”

“Very good. I’ll do it on Sunday night. The day after
tomorrow. Does that work for you?”

“Of course. We are at your disposal.” A pause. They looked
quite intrigued. “And then what?”

“Then nothing. It is only one session. I figure it should
last one hour, more or less.”

They exchanged glances. They all
decided at once not to ask any more questions. What for? One of them
wrote the address down on a piece of paper, then they stood up — serious,
circumspect.

“We’ll expect you then.”

“At ten.”

“Perfect. Any instructions?”

“No. See you on Sunday.”

They began to shake hands. As could be expected,
they had left the question of compensation for this already marginal moment.

“Needless to say . . . your fee . . . ”

Dr. Aira, categorical:

“I don’t charge. Not a cent.”

As awkward as his gestures, his facial expressions, and
his tone of voice usually were, in this case, and only in this case, he had
struck just the right note.

There couldn’t possibly be a question of money, not for
anybody there! And yet, that’s all this was about. Money had been left out, but
only because there was so much of it. In spite of this being the first time he’d
ever dealt with such affluent people, Dr. Aira had responded with the almost
instinctive confidence that only long habit can provide, as if he had done
nothing his whole life but prepare himself for this moment. It must have been in
his genes. In fact, someone as poor as he was couldn’t charge people as rich as
they were for his services. One simply places oneself in their hands, places the
rest of one’s life and one’s children’s lives in their hands. After all,
billions of dollars were involved. As it was a question of life or death, it was
as if the entire family fortune had been translated into wads of bills and
stuffed into a briefcase. The amount was so colossal, and what he could charge,
or want, or even dream of, was such a minuscule fraction of it, that the two
quantities were almost incongruent. No matter how hard he tried not to think
about the issue (he’d have time later, once he’d gone out the office door), he
couldn’t help making a quick calculation related to the installments. It was a
calculation he made totally “in the air,” in the pure relativity of fantasy,
because he had still not asked for a single estimate from a printer; he had
planned to do so in a few days, but this now prevented him, or better said, it
gave him a good excuse to keep postponing it. Be that as it may, publishing was
very cheap, and compared with the business they conducted here, the cost was
marginal and insignificant. That’s how he liked to think of it: as if the
financial aspect could simply be canceled. This gave real meaning to his
publishing business. He realized, in that momentary fantasy, that he could
seriously consider things he had been placing in the “fantasy” category, like
hard covers made of cardboard wrapped in paper with a satin finish, and
full-color illustrations. The leap from the large to the small, from the fortune
of these magnates to his trivial dealings with some neighborhood print shop, was
so enormous that through it everything became possible: all luxuries, such as
folding pages, vegetable inks, transparencies inserted between the pages,
engravings . . . And it’s not as if he’d abstained from thinking about these
options: one could almost say he had done nothing but. But he had done so as an
impractical fantasy, even when he deigned to consider the most practical
details. Now, suddenly, reality was intervening, and it was as if he should
retrieve each and every dream, and every feature of every passage in every
dream, and rethink them. He couldn’t wait to be back in his house in Flores,
open his file of notes on the installments, reread them one by one, because
surely they would all appear marvelously new in the light of reality. He took a
taxi so he could get there more quickly. For once he allowed himself the luxury
of not responding to the taxi driver’s crude attempts to engage him in
conversation; he had too much to think about. Of course he still didn’t have the
money, and he had even rejected it outright. And what if these people, with the
insensitivity so typical of millionaires, had taken him literally? It was highly
probable, the most probable thing in the world. But it wouldn’t do him any good
to worry about it now.