The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (14 page)

They got out to explore. The two drops, sealed in their space suits, floated in the
fourteen thousand dense atmospheres of planet Carumba. On the horizon, Perspective
appeared, perched on stilts, wearing pearl necklaces, carrying a yellow handbag, her
white hair swirling in a cloud of quarks. She seemed indifferent. She never looked
at anyone because she knew that all eyes were on her; and the enraptured drops were
no exception. They had been missing that beautiful deity ever since they left the
painting. They would have liked to shelter again under her invisible wings. But she
didn’t see them. Her eyes were fixed on the beyond. Was that abandonment the price
they had to pay for the freedom that had allowed them to go so far? Unwittingly, the
three of them had formed a perfectly symmetrical figure.

Then something happened. With a sound like thunder, the black concavity of the ether
tore open, and Gravity appeared, in his crimson plastic cape and pointy shoes. The
drops took fright, thinking he would fall and squash them. To their relief, he
passed overhead and landed on the downward-curving line of the horizon. Perspective,
who was on the same line, slid along it and fell into the arms of Gravity. He was
waiting with open arms and an erection. She connected perfectly, like a heart
impaling itself on a lance. When they made contact, there was a sound of kissing,
and bright rays of light, on which the constellations would come to rest, went
shooting out in all directions. What had happened? Simply that the meeting of two
drops had brought the ever-remote Perspective into her own proximity. And Gravity,
who had been anticipating this opportunity for countless thousands of years, didn’t
let it pass him by. In recognition of the favor, he turned, without letting go of
Perspective, and gave them a knowing wink. The two drop-astronauts were amazed that
their presence in a place that could have been Anywhere should have produced such an
extraordinary effect. Since leaving the painting back in the Louvre, they had become
accustomed to causing no effect at all. The embrace continued and worked a
transformation. Gravity, formerly so serious and rotund, became slim and amusing.
Perspective shed her customary air of decrepitude, taking on a compact and tangible
form. Their nuptials were celebrated at an instant party; there was no need to send
out invitations (they’d been on their way since the Big Bang).

The two drops looked at each other, as if to say: “How about that?” The same thought
had occurred to them at the same moment: now they knew for sure that the Pope would
remain a bachelor forever. They imagined him in the Vatican, jilted at the altar,
standing there in his white dress, holding the suppositories, a tear rolling down
his wrinkly old cheek. It was the last fantasy, and the most realistic.

The pair of newlyweds drove off in a car, trailing tin cans through the firmament. It
was to be a combative honeymoon, for they were preparing the final assault on
Evolution, the eternal spinster, and this time, now that the balance of power had
been upset (divide and conquer), she would be defeated.

But the drops that were treading reality’s fantastic limits . . . remained within the
real and succumbed to melancholy.

JUNE 19, 2003

The All That Plows through the Nothing

THERE ARE TWO LADIES AT THE GYM
who talk nonstop, occasionally to
other people, but always to each other. They seem to be lifelong friends, with
everything in common: the same dyed-blond hair, the same clothes, the same
reactions, and no doubt the same tastes. Even their voices are similar. They’re the
kind of ladies who, having turned fifty and reached middle age, feeling they should
take care of their bodies, decide to start going to the gym together, because they
wouldn’t go on their own. Not that these two need much extra physical activity;
they’re slim and active and seem to be in good shape. They’re local housewives, with
nothing to set them apart except for their chattiness, which is hardly an
exceptional quality. It’s not as if the gym’s the only place they can talk, because
they’re already talking when they arrive. If I’m on one of the bikes near the
entrance, I hear their voices as they come up the stairs; they talk in the dressing
room while they’re getting changed; then they work out together on the bikes, the
treadmills, and the various machines, without interrupting their conversation for a
moment; and they’re still talking when they leave. I’m not the only one to have
noticed. Once when they were in the women’s dressing room and I was in the men’s, I
could hear them talking, talking, talking, and I said to the instructor: “They sure
can talk, those two.” He nodded and raised his eyebrows: “It’s scary. And the things
they say! Have you listened to them?” No, I hadn’t, although it would have been
easy, because they speak loudly and clearly, as people do when they have no secrets
or concerns about privacy. They conform to a stereotype: housewives and mothers who
are sure of themselves and their normality. Once, years ago, in a different gym, I
came across a similar but different case: two girls who talked all the time, even
when they were doing really demanding aerobic exercises; they were young and must
have had tremendous lung capacity. One day when whey were on facing mats, doing the
kind of sit-ups that take your breath away, talking all the while, I pointed them
out to the instructor, who said, excusing them: “It’s because they’re good friends
and they both work all day: this is the only time they get to spend together.” But
it’s not like that for the two ladies, who are clearly together for a large part of
the day: I’ve seen them shopping in the neighborhood, or looking in store windows,
or sitting in a café, always talking, talking, talking.

I didn’t really think about this until one day, by chance—they must have been
on bikes near mine—I heard what they were saying. I can’t remember what it
was, but I do remember that it made a strange impression on me, and though I
couldn’t articulate that strangeness at the time, I resolved in a half-conscious and
somewhat halfhearted way (after all, what was it to me?) to get to the bottom of
it.

At this point there’s something I should explain about myself, which is that I don’t
talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social
life. It’s not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people
generally have when they’re trying to put something complex into words. I’d even say
I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given
me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for
small talk, and there’s no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn’t be
convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as
“hollowing”). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can’t
maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem,
I suppose—and this may be an effect of involvement with literature—is
that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it’s never simply a
question of “talking” but always a question of “what to talk about.” And the effort
of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words,
when everything you say has to be “worth the effort,” it’s too much effort to go on
talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and
keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality
from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. “But what do they talk about?” I
wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my
social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I
can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all
the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a
mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my “rich
inner life.” And I’ve never been able to resolve the conundrum that
conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk
about? I don’t even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there’s no
answer. I wasn’t wondering how those women did it, and yet I was given an answer so
unexpected and surprising that a terrifying abyss opened before me.

Suddenly, in the ceaseless flow of their dialogue, one said to the other: “They gave
my husband the results of his analysis, and he has cancer; we asked for an
appointment with the oncologist . . .” I took that in and began to think. Naturally
my first thought was that I’d misheard, but I hadn’t. I don’t know if I’m
reproducing her words exactly, but that was the gist, and the other woman replied,
in an appropriately sympathetic and worried manner, but she wasn’t overly surprised;
she didn’t cry out or faint. And yet this was really big news. Too big to crop up
casually in a conversation, as if it were just one among many other items. I was
sure that the two of them had been in the gym for at least an hour, and they’d been
talking all that time; also, they’d arrived together, which meant that their
conversation had begun a fair while before . . . So had they discussed ten, twenty,
or thirty other topics before they got around to the husband’s cancer? I considered
a number of possibilities. Maybe the woman concerned had been keeping this momentous
disclosure in reserve, in order to drop it “like a bombshell” at a particular
moment; maybe she’d been gathering the strength to tell her friend; maybe she’d been
inhibited by some kind of reticence, which had finally given way. Or it could have
been that the news was not, in fact, all that important: suppose, for example, that
the man she was calling “my husband” (for the sake of convenience) was an
ex-husband, and they’d been separated for many years, and there was no longer any
bond of affection between them. More daring or imaginative explanations were
possible too. Perhaps they were talking about the plot of a novel or a play that the
woman was writing (for a writing workshop they attended together, just as they
exercised together at the gym); or it could have been a dream that she was
recounting (although the verb tenses were wrong for that), or whatever. And there
was a further hypothesis, which was barely less improbable: that the women had been
dealing with more important and urgent matters since they’d met two or three hours
earlier and had just got around to the cancer when I overheard them. Absurd as it
might seem, this was in the end the most logical and realistic explanation, or at
least the only one left standing.

In the course of these reflections, I remembered the previous occasion on which I’d
heard them talking and the vaguely strange impression it had made on me. Now I could
bring that impression into focus and understand the strangeness retrospectively. It
was the same thing, but to enter fully into my consciousness, it had to be repeated.
The first time (now I remembered) the news had been less amazing: one of the women
was telling the other that, the previous day, the painters had started on the inside
of her house, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets; it was utter chaos,
the way it always is “when you have the painters in.” The other woman sympathized
and replied that, although it was terribly inconvenient, repainting was something
that had to be done; you couldn’t go on living in a flaky old ruin, and so on, and
so on. The little puzzle that I hadn’t been able to formulate was this: how could
such an upheaval in the existence of a housewife simply crop up in the middle of a
conversation, instead of being announced at the start or, indeed, discussed for days
in advance? The matter of the husband’s cancer had opened my eyes because it was
much more shocking, but the same fundamental mechanism had been at work in both
cases.

From then on, I began to pay attention. I have to say it wasn’t all that easy, for
physical as much as psychological reasons. The main physical difficulty was that the
gym is a very noisy place: the machines clang when the iron weights are stacked, the
pulleys squeak, there’s a high-pitched beep every fifteen seconds to regulate the
time spent at each station, the electric motors of the treadmills hum and moan, the
chorus of exercise bikes can be deafening when several are being used at once,
everyone talks and some people yell; and, of course, there are music videos on the
TV all the time, with the volume up high, and usually, on top of that, there’s the
much louder music of the aerobics class in the back room (it makes the windows
shake). The two women, as I said, speak loudly—they don’t care who’s
listening—so it’s easy to hear that they’re talking, but it’s not so easy to
hear what they’re saying unless you’re very close. My exercise routine gave me
plenty of opportunities to get close to them because it kept me on the move, but it
also meant that I couldn’t stay close for long without provoking suspicion.

Even so, what I heard was enough to nourish a growing perplexity. Whatever the time
and whatever they were doing, whether they were coming or going, halfway through
their routine or in the dressing room or on the roller massage tables, they were
always reporting some important piece of news and discussing it with due zeal. And
if, by stepping up my surveillance operation, I managed to hear them two or three or
four times in a day, there was always something new and important, far too important
to be coming up after hours of conversation—except that their conversation
consisted of nothing else. “In the storm last night the tree behind our house fell
down and crashed right into the kitchen.” “Our car was stolen yesterday.” “My son’s
getting married tomorrow.” “Mom died.”

That wasn’t small talk, not at all. But I don’t really know what small talk is. I
thought I did, but now that I’ve begun to doubt its existence, I’m not sure anymore.
If those two women are representative, maybe people always talk because they have
something to say, something really worth saying. I’m starting to wonder if there’s
such a thing as “talking for the sake of talking,” if it’s not just a myth I
invented to disguise my lack of life, that is, basically a lack of things to talk
about.

Or is it the other way around? Maybe those two ladies are the myth I’ve invented.
Except that they exist. And how! I see (and hear) them every day. And their
existence is not confined to the “magnetic field” of the gymnasium. As I said, I’ve
seen and heard them in the street as well. Just yesterday afternoon, as it happens.
I’d gone out for a walk and I ran into them; they were coming out of a perfume
store, in the midst of an animated conversation. I managed to catch a couple of
sentences as I went by. One was telling the other that she and her daughter had
argued the day before, and the argument had ended with the daughter declaring that
she was moving out to live on her own . . . It was seven in the evening, and they’d
been together and talking all day (I’d seen them at the gym that morning). I’m
leaving aside the possibility that they say these things “for my benefit,” not just
because, as a practical joke, it would be too complicated, but also because they
haven’t even noticed I exist, nor is there any reason why they should.

One way to solve the problem would be to make a list of all the topics they cover in
a day, and see if there’s a basically plausible progression from more to less
important. I would be better placed to undertake this task than almost anyone
because I have access to them first thing in the morning, at the gym, for two long
hours. But I haven’t done it and I won’t. I’ve mentioned the physical obstacles
already, and I said that there were psychological difficulties too. These come down
to one thing, in the end: fear. Fear of a certain kind of madness.

There’s a bylaw in Buenos Aires that forbids the transportation of animals in taxis.
Like all laws in Argentina, this one can be bent. In these hard times, if a lady
wants to get in with her lapdog, ten out of ten taxi drivers are going to let her.
But the law is still in force, exerting a pressure on the conscience, giving
chimerical grounds for caution. According to one of those tenacious urban legends,
one day a woman got into a taxi carrying a capuchin monkey dressed up as a baby,
with a little coat, slippers, a nappy, and a pacifier, and the driver didn’t notice
the ruse until the monkey bit off half his ear. Embittered and coarsened by a life
chained to the wheel, he’d probably been thinking (if anything): “Gotta pity her,
with an ugly kid like that!”

Someone once told me you can even take a goat in a taxi, as long as you promise to
hold it down on the floor and give the driver a tip. That shows just how flexible
the laws of our “autonomous” province can be. And yet a taxi driver can turn away a
passenger who’s carrying a plant. Amazing but true, as anyone can verify. I’m not
talking about a tree or a rhododendron with a six-yard circumference: just a regular
little plant, in a pot or a plastic bag, an oregano seedling, an orchid growing on a
piece of old tree trunk, a bonsai.

And the drivers can be intransigent, if they feel like it. There’s no point objecting
or trying to argue. Convinced that they’re acting as designated agents of the law,
they’ll leave a passenger standing there with his or her little plant, even if it’s
an old man, or a mother with small children (and pregnant to boot), or a disabled
person, even if it’s raining. The law, of course, says nothing about plants; it
mentions only animals, and extending the prohibition to the vegetable realm is a
clear and indefensible abuse of power.