The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (20 page)

The game was very simple and austere, and that’s why it was inexhaustible. By
definition, it couldn’t be boring. And anyway, how could we have been bored? It was
pure freedom. In the playing, the game revealed itself as part of life, and life was
vast, elastic, endless. We knew that prior to any experience. We were austere, like
our parents, the neighborhood, the town, and life in Pringles. Today it’s almost
impossible to imagine just how simple that life was. Having lived it myself doesn’t
help. I’m trying to imagine it, to give some form to that idea of simplicity,
putting memories aside, avoiding them as much as possible.

Sometimes, in the plenitude that followed an especially satisfactory session of play,
we did something that seemed to depart from simplicity, but in fact confirmed it. We
played the same game as a joke, out of pure exuberance, as if we hadn’t understood,
as if we were savages, or stupid.

“One.”

“Zero.”

“Minus a thousand.”

“Zero point zero nine nine nine.”

“Minus three.”

“A hundred and fifteen.”

“A million billion quadrillions.”

“Two.”

“Two.”

This didn’t last very long, because it was too dizzying, too horizontal. A minute of
it gave us a totally different perspective on what we’d been doing for hours before,
as if we’d jumped down off a horse, descended from the world of mental numbers to
that of real numbers, to the earth where the numbers lived. If we had known what
surrealism was, we would have cried: Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes
everything! Then we went back to the normal game like someone going back to sleep,
back to efficiency and representation.

All the same, a certain nostalgia crept in, a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. It
didn’t happen at a particular moment, after a day or a month or a year . . . I’m not
writing a chronological history of this game, from invention and development to
decadence and neglect. I couldn’t, because it didn’t happen like that. The
successiveness of this narration is an unavoidable defect; I don’t see how I could
avoid it while still giving an account of the game. The dissatisfaction had to do
with the difference between numbers and words. We had made the very austere decision
to limit ourselves to real, “classical” numbers. Positive or negative, but everyday
numbers, of the kind that are used for counting things. And numbers are not words.
Words are used to name numbers, but they’re not the same.

This, of course, had been a choice, a pact that we renewed each time we started
playing, and we didn’t complain. The game made thought mobile and porous, loosened
it like a kind of relaxing yoga, allowing us to see the kingdom of the sayable in
all its amplitude while preventing us from entering it. Words were more than
numbers; they were everything. Numbers were a little subset of the universe of
words, a marginal, faraway planetary system where it was always night. We hid there,
sheltered from the excesses of the unknown, and tended our garden.

From our hiding place we could see words as we’d never seen them before. We’d
distanced ourselves from them so that we could see how beautiful, funny, and
amazingly effective they were. Words were magical jewels with unlimited powers, and
all we had to do, we felt, was reach out and take them. But that feeling was an
effect of the distance, and if we crossed the gap, the game dissolved like a mirage.
We knew that, and yet some strange perversion, or the lure of danger, sustained our
crazy longing to try . . .

We were testing the power of words every day. I never missed an opportunity: I’d see
one coming, feel that I was grasping the mirage, taking control of its unerring
death ray, and

I wouldn’t rest until I’d fired it. My favorite victim, needless to say, was
Omar:

“Let’s play who can tell the biggest lie.”

Omar shrugged:

“I just saw Miguel go past on his bike.”

“No, not like that . . . Let’s pretend we’re two fishermen and we’re lying about what
we’ve caught. The one who says the biggest lie wins.”

I emphasized “biggest,” to suggest that it had something to do with the number game.
Omar, who could be diabolically clever when he wanted, made it hard for me:

“I caught a whale.”

“Listen, Omar. Let’s make it simpler. The only thing you can say is the weight of the
fish, its length in yards, or its age. And let’s set some upper limits: eight tons,
eighty yards, and eight hundred years. No! Let’s make it really simple! Just the
age. Let’s suppose fish go on growing until they die. So by saying the age you’re
saying the length, the width, the weight, and all that. And let’s suppose they can
live any number of years but the highest number we can say is eight hundred. You
start.”

Omar would have had to be really stupid not to realize by this stage that I had
something up my sleeve, something very specific. And he wasn’t stupid at all; he was
very intelligent. He had to be, supremely: he was the measure of my intelligence. In
the end, he resigned himself:

“I caught an eight-hundred-year-old fish.”

“I caught its grandfather.”

Omar clicked his tongue with infinite scorn. I wasn’t especially proud of the idea
myself: it was an unfortunate attempt to play a practical joke on my friend by
recycling a gag I’d read in a magazine, which must have gone something like this:
“Two fishermen, inveterate liars, are talking about the day’s catch: ‘I caught a
marlin
this
big.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that was the newborn
baby. I caught its mother.’ ” What a flat joke! I worked so hard to set it up, and
for such a paltry result! What did I ever see in it? Nothing but the power of the
word. The joke contained, in a nutshell, both our number game (the lying fishermen
could go on increasing the dimensions of the fish
ad
libitum
) and that which transcended it: a word (like “mom,” or “dad,” or
“grandfather”) triumphed over the whole series of numbers by placing itself on a
different level.

So that’s what I was referring to. That was the game’s limit, its splendor and its
misery.

Until we discovered the existence of
that word
.
This, I repeat, did not occur at a particular moment in the game’s history. It
happened at the beginning—it was the beginning.

The word was “infinity.” Logical, isn’t it? Perhaps even blindingly obvious? In fact,
it has been a strain for me to call it the “number game,” when it was really the
“infinity game,” which is how I’ve always thought of it. If I had to transcribe the
archetypal session, the original, the matrix, it would be simply this:

“One.”

“Infinity.”

Everything else sprang from that. How could it have been otherwise? Why would we have
denied ourselves that leap when every other kind of leap was allowed? In fact, it
was the other way around: all the leaps that we allowed ourselves were based on the
leap into the heterogeneous world of words.

From this point on, we can, I think, begin to glimpse an answer to the question that
has been building subliminally since I began to describe the game: when did the
sessions come to an end? Who was the winner? It’s not enough to say: Never, no one.
I’ve given the impression that neither of us ever fell into the traps that we were
continually laying for each other. That’s true in the abstract, in the myth that was
ritually expressed by the various series, but it can’t always have been the case in
the actual playing of the game. To be honest, I can’t remember.

I
feel
I can remember it all, as if I were
hallucinating (otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this), but I have to admit that
there are things I don’t remember. And if I were to be absolutely frank, I would
have to say I don’t remember anything. An escalation, once again. But there’s no
contradiction. In fact, the only thing I remember with the real microscopic clarity
you need in order to write is the forgetting.

So:

“Infinity.”

Infinity is the limit of all numbers, the invisible limit. As I said, with the big
numbers we were thinking blind, beyond intuition; but infinity is the transition to
the blindness of blindness, something like the negation of negation. And that’s
where the real visibility of my forgotten memory begins. Do I actually know what
infinity means? It’s all I can know, but I can’t know it.

There’s something wonderfully practical about leaping to the infinite, the sooner the
better. It thwarts every kind of patience. There’s no point waiting for it. I loved
it blindly. It was the sunny day of our childhood. That’s why we never wondered what
it meant, not once. Because it was the infinite, the leap had already happened.

Our refusal to think it through had a number of consequences. We knew that it didn’t
make sense to talk about “half an infinity,” because in the realm of the infinite
the parts are equal to the whole (half of infinity, the series of even numbers, say,
is just as infinite as the other half, or the whole). But, returning surreptitiously
to healthy common sense, we accepted that two infinities were bigger than one.

“Two infinities.”

“Two hundred and thirty million infinities.”

“Seven quintillion infinities.”

“Seven thousand billion billion quintillion infinities.”

“A hundred thousand billion billion trillion quintillion infinities.”

And so we continued until the word made its triumphant return:

“Infinity infinities.”

This formula could, in turn, be included in a series of the same kind:

“Ten billion infinity infinities.”

“Eight thousand billion trillion quadrillion quintillion infinity infinities.”

We didn’t pronounce these words, of course. I should make it clear that in general we
didn’t actually articulate all the little series that I’ve been transcribing here;
neither these particular ones nor others of the same kind. I’ve set it out in this
long-winded way to make myself clear, but it wasn’t our intention to labor the
obvious; on the contrary. All these series, and in fact all the series that might
have occurred to us, were virtual. It would have been boring to say them. We weren’t
prepared to waste our precious childhood hours on bureaucratic tasks like that; and,
above all, it would have been pointless, because each term was surpassed and
annihilated by the next. Numbers have that banal quality, like examples: they’re
interchangeable. What matters is something else. Stripping away all the stupid and
bothersome foliage of examples, what we should have said was:

“A number.”

“A number bigger than that.”

“A number bigger than that.”

“A number bigger than that.”

Although, of course, if we’d done that, it wouldn’t have been a game.

The word returned once more:

“Infinity infinity infinities.”

Only one number was bigger than that:

“Infinity infinity infinity infinities.”

I mean: that was the smallest bigger number, not the only one, because the series of
infinities could be extended indefinitely. And so we ended up repeating the word
over and over in a typically childish way, at the top of our voices, as if it were a
tongue-twister.

“Infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity infinity
infinity infinity infinities.”

There was, believe it or not, an even bigger number: the number that one of us would
say next. It was pure virtuality, the state in relation to which the game deployed
all its marvelous possibilities.

Amazingly, given our greediness, it never occurred to us to add the name of a thing
to the numbers. Bare like that, the numbers were nothing, and we wanted everything.
There’s no real contradiction between the two half-wild children I’ve been
describing, in a society that seems archaic and primitive today, and the fact that
we were greedy. We wanted everything, including Rolls-Royces and objects that would
have been no use to us, like diamonds and subatomic particle accelerators. We wanted
them so badly! With an almost anguished longing. But there’s no contradiction. The
supernatural frugality of our parents’ lives had apparently achieved its goal, and
perhaps that goal was us. They were still using the furniture they’d bought when
they got married; the rent was fixed; cars lasted forever; and the mania for
household appliances would take decades to reach Pringles . . .

What’s more, we always had enough money to buy the few things on sale that interested
us: picture cards, comic books, marbles, chewing gum. I don’t know where we got it
from, but it never ran out. And yet we were insatiable, greedy, supremely avid. We
wanted a schooner with a solid-gold figurehead and silken sails, and in our
fantasies about discovering a treasure—doubloons and ingots and emeralds—we
weren’t so rash as to spend it at once on this or that; we converted it into cash,
placed the sum in a bank and, as the compound interest mounted, bought ourselves
Easter Island statues, the Taj Mahal, racing cars, and slaves. Even then we weren’t
satisfied. We wanted the philosopher’s stone or, better, Aladdin’s lamp. We weren’t
deterred by the fate of Midas: we were planning to wear gloves.

The numbers were numbers and nothing more. Especially the big numbers. Eight could
still be eight cars; one for each day of the week, and one extra with swamper tires
for rainy days. But a billion? An infinity? Infinity infinities? That could only be
money. Why we never talked about this is a mystery to me. Maybe it went without
saying.

The tree, a giant dark-green triangle hiding half the sky, kept watch over the little
red truck, with the two of us inside, tireless and happy. The day was a stillness of
sunlight.

Among the many daydreams prompted by the natural world, an especially frequent
variety explores the perfection of the mechanisms by means of which living beings
function. Gills, for example. A fish, as it swims, lets water pass through what I
presume is a sort of hydrodynamic valve, and extracts from that water the oxygen it
needs. How it does this doesn’t matter. Somehow. To simplify and conceptualize, as I
did in the two previous sentences, it’s relatively straightforward: you can imagine
an apparatus, an alembic, in which water is broken down and oxygen retained while
the hydrogen is allowed to escape. Daydreaming retains something, too, and lets
something else escape. What it retains in this case is the size of the fish: some
fish are tiny, no bigger than a match, and in a fish so small the apparatus becomes
a marvel . . . Or does it? To put it together and take it apart, we’d have to use
magnifying glasses and microscopes, screwdrivers and tweezers and tiny hammers the
size of needle points; it would be a feat of patience and dexterity. A feat that
might be pulled off once, at a very optimistic estimate; but there are billions of
those fish in the sea . . . At this point we should bow to the evidence and admit
that the reasoning behind the daydream contains an error. Two errors, actually. The
first is having overlooked the difference between doing something and finding it
done. No one has ever set about making gills for little fish. They are ready-made.
Constructivism is an empty illusion. The second has to do with size. Here the error
lies in taking our human size as a fixed standard. In fact, the demiurge chooses a
scale appropriate to each case, or rather he chose it at the outset, in the process
of creating all the sizes. It’s a fluid, elastic studio, where it’s always a
pleasure and a joy to work, in comfortable conditions, by hand. I think that’s why
concepts are so attractive, why humans cling to them so stubbornly, from childhood
on, scorning all reality checks. It’s examples that are cumbersome and unwieldy; for
them, we’re never well proportioned, we’re always giants or dwarfs.