The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (21 page)

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples. I wouldn’t want anything I’ve
written to be taken as an example.

MARCH 21, 1993

No Witnesses

CIRCUMSTANCES HAD REDUCED ME TO
begging in the street. Since
direct and sincere requests were ineffective, I had to resort to fraud and trickery,
always on a small scale, pretending, for example, to be paralyzed, blind, or
afflicted with some terrible disease. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. One day
it occurred to me that I could try a subtler, more ingenious strategy, which, even
if it worked only once and wasn’t very lucrative, would at least give me the
satisfaction of having carried out a well considered, and, as I saw it, almost
artistic plan. I needed someone gullible to come along, preferably in a place where
there would be no witnesses. I walked for a while, on my aching feet (they really
were aching), through alleys that were all too familiar to me, since I lived and
slept in them, until I found a corner that was, I felt sure, well out of the way.
That was where I settled down to wait for my prey. I leaned against the wall, half
hidden by a Dumpster, holding a shallow box I’d found, which someone must have
thrown away: this box was what had given me the idea of trying a trick to get some
money. I should explain that at this point I still didn’t know what the trick would
be. I was going to improvise it at the last moment. Suddenly it was night. The
corner was very dark, but accustomed as I was to gloomy places, I could see fairly
well. And just as I had predicted, no one passed by. It was what I needed: a quiet
place with no witnesses. But I also needed a victim, and after some hours had
elapsed I became convinced that no one would come along. I must have fallen asleep
and woken up again several times. The silence was deep. I’m guessing that it would
have been midnight when I heard steps: someone was approaching. I didn’t move. It
was a man, that’s all I knew; there wasn’t enough light to see details. And before I
could move, or call out, or get his attention, I saw him go to the Dumpster and
start to rummage in it. I couldn’t really make him the target of my clever scam. All
the same, I would have given it a try, if only to get a coin out of him so I
wouldn’t feel I’d wasted the night. But before I could even begin to move, the
stranger lifted something heavy out of the Dumpster and stifled a cry. I exercised
my penetrating night vision. It was a bag full of gold coins. I was overcome at once
by the most bitter regret I have ever experienced: it was a fortune, and it had been
there, within arm’s reach, for hours—hours I’d wasted waiting for some innocent to
come along so I could trick him out of a tiny sum of money. And now that innocent
had come and snatched the treasure from under my nose. He looked both ways to make
sure that no one had seen him, and started running. He hadn’t noticed me down on the
ground. I’ve never had quick reflexes, but on this occasion, which was, I felt,
momentous and unique, something like desperation impelled me to act. I simply
stretched out my leg and tripped him. Just as he was speeding up, his foot caught on
my leg and he fell flat on his face. As I’d predicted, the bag fell with him, and
the coins scattered over the uneven paving stones of the alley with a loud jangling
noise, shining auspiciously. I thought he’d rush to pick up as many as he could
before running away, and that I’d be able to gather coins too, unchallenged, his
fall and the scattering of the booty having put us on an equal footing as
misappropriators. But that was not what happened, to my surprise and horror. Agile
as a cat, the man picked himself up and hurled himself at me from a crouching
position, pulling a huge knife from his pocket. In spite of living rough on the
streets, I hadn’t toughened up. I was still timid and would run away from any kind
of violence. But there was not the slightest hope of running away this time. He was
already on top of me, raising the knife, then plunging it into my chest with
tremendous force. It almost came out the other side and must have gone very close to
my heart. I could feel death coming, with utter certainty. But imagine my surprise
when I saw that the wound he’d inflicted on me had appeared in his chest, in just
the same place, and was beginning to bleed. His heart had been wounded too. He
looked down, baffled. He didn’t understand, and it was no wonder. He had stabbed me,
and the wound had appeared in his body as well. He pulled the knife from my chest,
and, with death beginning to cloud his vision, as it was clouding mine, stabbed
again, next to the first wound, as if to test the strange phenomenon. And sure
enough, the second wound appeared in his chest. It, too, began to bleed. It was the
last thing I (or he) saw.

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

The Spy

IF I WERE A CHARACTER
in a play, the lack of real privacy would
make me feel wary, anxious, and suspicious. One way or another I’d sense the quiet,
attentive presence of the public. I’d always be conscious that my words were being
heard by others, and while that might be appropriate for some of my lines (certain
clever remarks are made to impress as many people as possible, and in fact there are
times when one regrets not having a public to appreciate them), other lines would,
I’m sure, require a real, not a fictitious, intimacy. And they would be crucially
important for understanding the plot: all the interest and value of the play would
hinge on them. But their importance would not loosen my tongue. On the contrary, I
would scrupulously observe the rule of secrecy, as I’ve always done. I would simply
choose not to speak. I’d say: “Let’s go to another room; there’s something important
I need to tell you that no one else should hear.” But then the curtain would fall,
and in the next scene, we’d be in the other room, that is, the same stage with
different props. I’d glance around and sense something indefinable . . . I know that
in the fictional world of the play there are no rows of seats out there, and, as a
character, I’d know it better still, because it would be the basis of my existence,
but even so . . . “No, I can’t talk here either . . .” I’d lead my interlocutor to
another room, and from that one to yet another . . . Realizing eventually that the
stage would follow me to the ends of the earth, I would, of course, be able to stay
out of trouble by making banal remarks that gave nothing away, which would mean
sacrificing the interest of the play. But that’s precisely what I would never be
able to sacrifice, because my existence as a character would depend on it. So there
would come a moment when I would have no choice but to speak. Even so, I’d hold out,
gagged by an overpowering distrust. My lips would be sealed; the keys to the plot
(the ones in my possession, at least) would not be revealed, no, never! As in a
nightmare, I would look on helplessly as a large or small, but significant and
perhaps even crucial, portion of the work’s aesthetic value disappeared. And it
would be my fault. The other characters would start to move and act like lost or
mutilated puppets, with no life or sense of destiny, as they do in those botched
plays where nothing ever happens . . .

Then, and only then, would I grasp at my last hope: maybe the audience would guess
what it was I had to say, in spite of my refusal to come out and say it. Hardly a
realistic hope, because I’d be hiding facts, not just comments or opinions. If what
I have to reveal, to someone in particular, with the utmost discretion and for very
specific reasons, is that I’m a secret agent working undercover, and if that piece
of information has, logically, been kept hidden in everything I’ve said so far and
will say in the future (a competent author would see to that), how are the people in
the audience supposed to guess? It’s preposterous to hope that they could deduce it
from my silence or my scruples about privacy, because, after all, I could be hiding
any number of secrets: rather than a spy, I might be the illegitimate son of the
master of the house, or a fugitive who has adopted the identity of the man he
murdered . . .

Crazy as it is, banking like this on the spectator’s superhuman intelligence is the
flip side of a fear that is also fairly absurd, but often turns out to be justified:
the fear of being found out in spite of everything. The reason I refuse to speak,
and behave so circumspectly, to the point of taking precautions based on a
superstitious hunch (the feeling that one of the four walls really is missing and
that there are people sitting in rows of seats listening to what I say), is that I
have secrets to keep, dark secrets.

But isn’t this exactly the wrong thing to be doing: harboring the hope that my secret
will be guessed? How could it even occur to me to call this a “hope,” in real life?
The cause of this wild aberration is art, the world of art into which I have
ventured by becoming a character. In art, there’s a condition that takes precedence
over all others: it has to be well done. Which is why I have to be a good actor, in
a good play; if I don’t act well, the play will not produce the desired effect, and
the performance will collapse. In this field, more than in any other, “doing it
well” and simply “doing it” are synonymous. So if I dissociate them, because of my
hypersensitive wariness, all I have left is hope: a ruinous hope, equivalent to
death. Because my secrets are so terrible that I couldn’t survive their revelation.
This is something I hadn’t realized until now, until I found myself in this fix, and
I’m tempted to say that I entered the fatal game of art in order to come to this
realization.

Up until now I have lived in the certainty that my secrets are safe; they’re in the
past, and the past is inviolable. I’m the only one who has a key to that chest. Or
so I believe, at least: the past has been shut off definitively, and its secrets, my
secrets, will never be revealed to anyone, unless I start divulging them, which is
something I have no intention of doing. Sometimes, however, I’m not so sure that the
chest is closed forever. Time might turn back on itself somehow, in a way that my
imagination is unable to foresee—even though (or because) it’s precisely my
imagination that is generating these wild conjectures—making the hidden visible.
But then I always come around to thinking that the past really is secure,
inviolable, sealed, and that if worrying is what I really want to do, there are
better things to worry about. So many, in fact, that if I started counting them, I
could go on forever, because there’d always be something new. But they all converge
on the center, the spot to which I’m rooted at the center of the floodlit stage, in
my restless paralysis, quivering, bathed in a cold sweat . . .

There’s an actor joined to me. I can’t separate him from myself, except by means of
negative statements: I don’t know what he wants; I don’t know what he can do. I
don’t know what he’s thinking, either . . . He’s a statue of fear, an automaton of
apprehension, a fiber-for-fiber replica of me. The author has written him into the
play, as a doppelgänger. The idea has been done to death: one actor playing two
characters, who turn out to be twins or doubles. Given the limitations of the
theater, the two characters have to operate in distinct spaces if they are to be
played by the same actor. In between, there’s always a door, an entrance or an exit,
a mistake or a change of scenery. The staging dislocates the spaces, but also,
insofar as it builds up the fiction, establishes a continuity between them, creating
the horrific prospect of a face-to-face encounter with the double. And it’s possible
to go a little further, approaching Grand Guignol, and actually represent the
encounter, with the help of makeup, costumes, and lighting, as long as the audience
is not too close. (Note, however that this applies only to modern theater, because
in ancient times, masks made physical distance unnecessary.) In cinema, montage
solves the problem perfectly. In the theater, unless you resort to dubious tricks
(or you have a pair of actors who are really twins), the process of making the
double a theme has to become a theme in turn, so that the two identical characters
turn out to be one in the end.

Looking back at what I’ve written, it all seems rather muddled, and if I want to be
understood, I need to say it differently (not by means of examples, but, once again,
by making it the theme). Sooner or later there comes a time when being correctly
understood is vitally important. The hidden cannot endure without that transparency,
against which it becomes visible. The hidden: that is, secrets. I have secrets, like
everyone else; I don’t know if mine are especially shameful, but I take all sorts of
precautions to prevent them from coming to light. It’s natural for people to feel
that their own affairs are important; the self is a natural amplifier. When the
person concerned is a character in a dramatic performance, at the very center of the
plot, the amplification reaches deafening extremes. The whirlwind of the action
forbids any kind of detachment.

But if my best-kept secret is what I did in the past, perhaps that secret is
revealing itself in what is happening now, since, logically, the present must be the
result of the past, a result that, for an analytic mind, displays the traces of all
the events that played a part in producing it. But any attempt to unmask me with the
classic “by their fruit shall ye know them” would backfire, because what I’m trying
to hide is precisely the fact that in my case the process operated in reverse: the
fruits remained in the past, and no one could deduce their nature from observations
of the flower that is open in the present. This curious aberration could be due to
the nature of my original action, which was a separation, a “distancing” with
respect to my own person. I thought that I was seriously ill (I’m not going to go
into details) and I did something disgraceful: I abandoned my wife and young
children . . . The years went by, I adopted a new personality, I lived. I realized
the dream of living. As a young man I knew nothing of life, and as an older man too.
All I knew was that life existed, and love, and adventure; that there was something
beyond the world of books. And since I’d always been an optimist and trusted my
intelligence, I reached the alarming conclusion that I, too, could come to know what
life was and how it should be lived.

So, in desperation, I broke with my past, before it was too late. When the curtain
rises, I am the double of the man I was, a duplicate of myself, my identical twin.
Twenty years have gone by, but I’m still at the same point (I can’t fool myself), in
spite of being an other, my own other. I have learned computing, and channeled the
intellectual brilliance that characterized my writing into politics and betrayal,
and now it turns out that I am a double agent working undercover for both the high
command of the forces occupying Argentina and the secret Committee of the
Resistance. The action takes place in the palatial salons of the Quinta de Olivos,
around midnight, during a reception for the ambassadors of Atlantis. I’m wearing a
dinner jacket, looking very stylish: cool, competent, and hypocritical as ever. The
most amazing thing is that I haven’t aged; the mirrors show me as I was at thirty,
but I know that old age is just a step away, behind a door. I’ve always thought that
my youthful appearance (which, even at thirty, was very marked) is a symptom of my
failure to live. The sentence has only been suspended—for how long? The biological
process follows its inexorable course, but if the suspension continues after a
change of name, personality, and occupation, I really don’t know what I should do.

I’m a leading man, the finest flower of humanity, open in the present, in the theater
of the world. “By my fruits” I shall not be known, because I left them in another
life. And yet those fruits are coming back, in the most unexpected way. They are
coming back tonight, at this very moment, so punctually that the timing seems too
good to be true; but such is the law that governs the theater of the world. If a man
lives happily and peacefully with his family for decades, and one day a psychopath
bursts into his house and takes them all hostage, and rapes and kills them, when
will the film that tells the story be set? The day before?

There’s an extra guest at the reception, the most surprising of all for me: Liliana,
my wife (or I should say: my ex-wife, the wife of the man I was). She doesn’t know
I’m here, of course, or that I’m the gray eminence of the High Command; everyone
thinks I’m dead, or that I’ve disappeared. My break with the past was so clean that
I’ve had no news of Liliana in twenty years: she could have been dead and buried,
but no, she’s alive, and here she is . . . I see her by chance, in the distance, on
the far side of the gilded salon, but she doesn’t see me. I send a secretary to
investigate, and slip away to other salons in that labyrinthine palace. Pretexts are
easy enough to find: during the “real time” of the reception, meetings are underway
behind closed doors. The situation is explosive; imminent upheavals are expected;
the atmosphere is charged with anxiety.

Liliana has snuck in to make an appeal to the ambassadors of Atlantis. She won’t have
another opportunity because they will only be in the country for a few hours; they
have come to sign off on a bridging loan and will leave at midnight. The motors of
the limousines that will take them from the party straight to the airport are
already running. Liliana’s plan is to plead for the safe return of her son, who (I
now discover) has been arrested. Her son is my son too: Tomasito, my firstborn, whom
I haven’t seen since I walked out, when he was still a child; I’d forgotten all
about him. A simple calculation reveals that he must be twenty-two by now. Hmm . . .
so he became a dissident and joined the resistance and got caught. That kind of
involvement in politics must have been a result of his mother’s influence; and now I
remember Liliana’s aversion to Menem, Neustadt, Cavallo, and Zulemita. And I see how
she was able to get into the villa tonight: the Resistance Command, to which I
belong, must have organized it. I sent them a pair of invitations myself, as I
always do, in case they want to plant a bomb or kidnap someone. And she hasn’t come
on her own (they’ve used both the invitations I sent): she’s accompanied by a lawyer
from the local branch of Amnesty International, whose presence is considered
inoffensive; but I know that he has been, and still is, in contact with the
Coordinating Committee of the Resistance.

There’s something else, something that defies imagination, which I have discovered by
eavesdropping on conversations from behind doors and curtains: Liliana has gone
crazy. I have good reason to be amazed. Liliana, of all people! She’s so sensible,
so logical! When we were together, she counterbalanced my follies. But the most
organized minds are the first to collapse in a major crisis, and hers must have
given way under the stress caused by the disappearance of her son. My eavesdropping
soon yields irrefutable proof of her madness, when I hear her say that she has been
assisted in this mission by her lawyer . . . and her husband! Maybe she has
remarried? But no, because she mentions me by name: César Aira, the famous writer
(she’s exaggerating). She says I got held up in the salon, talking to someone who
asked for an autograph, that I’ll be coming soon . . . She’s crazy, she’s
hallucinating, poor thing. On the spur of the moment I make a bold decision: to
realize her illusion, to resume my old identity and go with her to meet the
ambassadors. This is not just a sympathetic gesture; it has a practical objective,
too: I know exactly what to say to make the ambassadors of Atlantis take action and
exert pressure on the occupying forces to return Tomasito: without me the mission is
doomed to fail. And this is the least I can do, because although I’ve abandoned and
disowned my family, he’s still my son, my blood.