The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (10 page)

That night, all we had to do was turn the corner and go three blocks to our house.
But we turned the other way, which didn’t surprise me. It was very cold, but there
was no wind. The street lights at the intersections, suspended by four diagonal
wires attached to the posts on the corners, were still. And, above us, the Milky Way
was all lit up and full of winks. I settled Geniol on my legs and hugged him to my
chest. He didn’t resist. His snow-white fur reflected the starlight. We continued
straight ahead to the square and then took the boulevard. Sitting with my back
against the cab, I could see the square tower of the city hall receding into the
distance and I assumed that we were heading for the station, to satisfy one of Mom’s
whims. The station was far away, and the mere supposition that we were going there
made me drowsy. Geniol had already fallen asleep. A few blocks down the boulevard,
the buildings began to thin out, giving way to big vacant lots taken over by mallows
and thistles. Those mysterious plots belonged to no one. My eyes were beginning to
close . . .

Suddenly Geniol shook himself, jumped off my lap, went to one side of the truck and
growled. His agitation startled and bewildered me. Struggling free of the muddle of
sleep, I looked too, and understood why we’d made the detour, and why Dad was
slowing down now, bringing the truck almost to a standstill: we were passing the
circus. My sister was leaning out the window in front and yelling in her
half-articulate way, “César! The circus! The circus!” I knew, of course, that a
circus had come to town; I’d seen the parades in the streets, and our parents had
already promised to take us the following day. I stared, entranced. Points and lines
of bright light showed through the canvas of the marquee, which seemed as big as a
mountain, and the whole thing glowed with the light inside. A performance was under
way: we could hear blaring music and the cries of the audience. The smell of the
animals had made Geniol nervous. Behind the marquee, in the darkness, I thought I
could see the silhouettes of elephants and camels moving among the wagons.

Many years later, I left Pringles, as young people with artistic or literary
inclinations often leave small towns, hungry for the cultural offerings promised by
the capital. And now, many years after that emigration, it strikes me that perhaps I
was lured away by a mirage, because nights from my childhood in Pringles come back
to me, each so vivid and manifold, that I can’t help wondering if I didn’t exchange
riches for poverty. The night I am reconstructing is a good example: a book drive, a
theatrical performance, and a circus, all at the same time. There was a range of
options to choose from, and you had to choose. And yet there were capacity crowds
everywhere. The circus was no exception. As we drove past the entrance, we had a
brief glimpse of the boxes crammed with families and the stands groaning under the
weight of the spectators. In the ring, the clowns had built a human pyramid, which
came tumbling down, provoking roars of laughter. Almost everyone was at the circus.
The inhabitants of Pringles must have thought it was the safest place.

Here an explanation is required. The circus had come to town three days earlier, and
almost immediately the troupe had been rocked by a tremendous scandal. Among the
attractions were three dwarfs. Two were men: twin brothers. The third, a woman, was
married to one of the twins. This peculiar triangle apparently had a defect that
made it unstable and led to the crisis that occurred in Pringles. The woman and her
brother-in-law were lovers, and for some reason they had chosen our town as the
place in which to make off with the savings of the cuckolded husband. We might never
have been aware of this bizarre intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that a few hours
after the disappearance of the lovers, the husband vanished too, along with a 9mm
pistol and a box of bullets belonging to the owner of the circus. His intentions
could not have been clearer. The police were notified immediately, in the hope of
averting a tragedy. The witnesses (clowns, trapeze artists, and animal trainers) all
agreed on how furious the husband had been when he found out, and how determined he
was to exact a bloody revenge. His threats were taken seriously, because he was a
violent little man, known for his destructive fits of rage. The weapon he had stolen
was lethal at close and long range, and there was no need to know how to use it. The
police mobilized all available manpower, and in spite of the circus authorities’
vehement insistence on discretion, the news got around. It was unavoidable, because
the whereabouts of the runaways—that is, both the lovers and their
pursuer—could be discovered only with the help of the public. At first, it
seemed a simple task: the town was small and it was easy to give a clear description
of the individuals in question, simply by using the word “dwarf.” Police officers
were positioned at the railway station, the long-distance bus terminal, and the two
roundabouts at opposite ends of the town, from which the outgoing roads diverged
(they were unsealed at the time). These measures served only to confirm that the
dwarfs were still in Pringles.

Not surprisingly, they were the sole topic of conversation. What with the joking, the
betting, and the collective searching of vacant lots and empty houses, the
prevailing mood had initially been one of cheerful agitation and delicious suspense.
Twenty-four hours later, the atmosphere had changed. Two fears had begun to creep
in, one vague and superstitious, the other very real. The first arose from the fact
that the case remained perplexingly unsolved. With ample justification, the
inhabitants of Pringles had assumed that the town was socially and geographically
transparent. How could something as conspicuous as three dwarfs go unnoticed in that
tiny glass box? Especially since the dwarfs did not compose a single mass, but were
split into a hiding pair and a third individual in pursuit, hiding in turn from the
authorities. The episode began to take on a supernatural coloring. The dimensions of
a dwarf turned out to be problematic, at least for the unsettled collective
imagination. Perhaps they should have been turning over stones, examining the
undersides of leaves, peering into cocoons? Mothers started looking under their
children’s beds, and children took their toys apart to check inside.

But there was a more realistic fear. Or, if not entirely realistic, it was at least
presented as such to rationalize the other one, the fear without a name. Somewhere
out there was a deadly loaded gun, in the hands of a desperate man. No one was
worried about him carrying out his plan (and this can be explained without accusing
the inhabitants of Pringles of being especially prejudiced; caught up in the general
panic, they regarded the dwarfs as a species apart, whose lives and deaths were
matters to be settled among themselves and were of no interest to the town), but
shots do not always find their mark, and at a given moment anyone might happen to
get in the way of a bullet. Anyone at all, because no one knew where the dwarfs
were, much less where their encounter would take place. The source of the anxiety
was not so much the husband’s aim as the elusive tininess of the adulterers. The
same fantastic miniaturization that accounted for the failure of the search led
people to imagine that every shot was bound to miss. How could he hit a hidden atom,
or two? Anybody, or their loved ones, could be cut down by a hail of stray bullets
at any moment, anywhere.

Another twenty-four hours later, the two fears had become tightly intertwined, and
the town had succumbed to an acute delirium of persecution. No one felt safe at
home, still less in the street. But there was something reassuring about public
gatherings, the bigger the better: other people could serve as human shields, and
since altruistic scruples go out the window when terror reigns, no one spared a
thought for those whose bodies would be riddled with bullets. That must have been
why we’d gone out to dinner, something we virtually never did. And on another level
of motivation, in the realm of magical thinking, it must have been why Dad had
brought Pushkin’s famous wallet, which he saved for special occasions. As you will
remember, Pushkin was killed by a shot to the heart.

Here I close the explanatory parenthesis and return to the story. But in doing so, I
notice that I have made a mistake. The action continues in the lobby of the theater,
which means that the drive along the boulevard past the circus must have happened
earlier, when we were on our way to the hotel. And in fact, when I think about it
more carefully, it seems to me that the sky behind the city hall and above the
circus tent was not entirely dark: it was the “blue hour,” with some remnants of
dusky pink, and a layer of phosphorescent white along the western horizon. The black
starry sky must have been an interpolation, suggested by the hair-raising events
that were to take place later, on the roof of the theater. My confusion may be due,
in part, to the story’s particular strangeness: although there is a compelling logic
to the order in which the various episodes follow one another, they also exist
independently, like the stars in the firmament that were the only witnesses to the
final act, so the figures they compose may seem to owe more to fantasy than to
reality.

It happened more or less like this: Having satisfied their curiosity about the
Musical Brain, my parents headed for the street, partly because there was nothing
more to see and partly to be gone before the audience started coming out of the
theater. The performance must have been over; the applause hadn’t stopped, but it
couldn’t go on for much longer, and Mom didn’t want to be seen leaving along with
“the great unwashed.” People who didn’t know better might think she had sunk to the
cultural depths of the Peronists.

She turned and began to walk out in such a decisive manner that I felt the moment had
come: it was safe now to indulge my desire to touch the large pink object. Without a
second thought, I reached out. The tip of my right index finger touched the surface
of the Brain for a bare fraction of a second. For reasons that will soon become
clear, that momentary contact was something I would never forget.

My naughtiness escaped the notice of my parents, who went on walking toward the lobby
doors, but not of my sister, who was two or three at the time, and imitated
everything I did. Emboldened by my daring, she wanted to touch the Brain too. But,
clumsy little devil that she was, she didn’t go about it daintily. For her, there
was no such thing as a fingertip. Drawing herself up to her full height—she
was barely as tall as the box on which the Brain was sitting—she raised her
little arms and pushed with all her might. Sensing what was about to happen, she
held her breath, then released it in a scream as the Brain began to move. My parents
stopped, and turned, and I think they took a step or two toward us. For me, the
whole scene had taken on a phantasmagorical precision, like a play rehearsed a
thousand times. The Musical Brain slid heavily over the edge of the box, fell to the
floor, and broke.

My sister burst into tears, more upset by guilt and fear of punishment than by the
sight that had appeared before our eyes, which was probably beyond her powers of
comprehension. I, however, was old enough to intuit what had happened, though
struggling in the throes of a horrified confusion, which my parents must have
shared.

The pink crust of the Musical Brain had shattered on impact, a sign of its fragility,
since it had fallen only a few feet. Inside was a solid, glassy mass, like gelatin,
perfectly molded by the shell. A certain flattening, and perhaps a certain wobble
from the aftershock (though I may have imagined this), suggested that the substance
wasn’t hard. The color was unequivocal. It was semi-coagulated blood, and it wasn’t
hard to figure out its origin, or origins, because two dead bodies were suspended in
the middle of the mass, in fetal position, head to toe: the male dwarfs, the twins.
They were like playing-card images, dressed in their little black suits, faces and
hands as white as porcelain; the color contrast made them visible through the dark
red of the blood, which had escaped from wounds in both throats like open, screaming
mouths.

I said that I saw this scene with supernatural clarity and that is how I see it now.
I see more now than I did then. It’s as if I were seeing the story itself, not as a
film or a sequence of images, but as a single picture, transforming itself by
freezing repeatedly rather than by moving. And yet there was plenty of movement: it
was a whirl, an abyss of irrational atoms.

Mom, who was prone to hysteria, started screaming, but her screams were drowned out
by a sudden uproar coming from the theater. Something unexpected was happening. The
great Leonor Rinaldi had already received her ovation, and the cast had taken seven
curtain calls. The actors were about to walk off after the final bow, and the
members of the audience were already rising from their seats. At that moment, as the
characters began to fade from the skins of the actors, who were standing all
together in a line across the stage, each face and body still identifiable as a part
of the comedy, but a comedy whose plot, with its surprises and errors, was jumbled
in that row of smiling, bowing figures, as if it were up to the spectators now, as
they clapped and ran their eyes along the line, to recompose the story and bid it
farewell as the fiction it was, along with the make-believe living-and-dining room,
the armchairs, the fake staircase, the painted windows, the doors that had opened
and closed in a cascade of comic revelations, and all the rest of the set . . . just
then, as the festivities drew to a close, the large plaster effigy of Juan Pascual
Pringles that adorned the apex of the proscenium arch burst open. The features of
the founding father exploded like a nova of chalk, and in their place the astonished
audience beheld the strangest creature ever produced by a theatrical deus ex
machina: the female dwarf. That had been her hiding place, and no one would ever
have found her. It might have seemed accidental: perhaps the vibrations caused by
the clapping and the shouts of “Bravo!” had loosened the aging molecules of the
heroic grenadier’s plaster head; but that supposition soon had to be abandoned when
it became clear that the bursting of the effigy had been produced by an internal
cause—namely, an increase in the size of the dwarf. Once impregnated, this
killer chrysalis had withdrawn to a safe hiding place in order to allow nature (of
which monsters are also a part, after all) to take its course. And, by chance, the
process had reached completion just as the actors were about to walk off; a few
minutes later and the creature would have emerged into a dark, empty theater.