The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (4 page)

At that moment I too had my flash of insight, and the smile froze on my face. Why
this hadn’t occurred to me before, I couldn’t understand, but all that mattered was
that it was occurring to me now. As in a nightmare, an insoluble problem loomed,
engulfing me in anxiety. I was still inside the museum: sooner or later I would have
to leave; my life as a rich man could only begin outside. And how could I leave the
Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?

NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Athena Magazine

WHEN WE WERE TWENTY, ARTURITO
and I launched a literary magazine
called
Athena
. With youthful enthusiasm and a fervent sense of mission, we
devoted ourselves body and soul to the work of writing, layout, printing, and
distribution . . . or at least the diligent planning of those activities, the
scheduling and budgeting. We knew nothing about the publishing business. We thought
we knew all about literature, but were happy to confess our almost total ignorance
of the concrete mechanisms that convey literature to its readers. We’d never set
foot in a printing works, and didn’t have the vaguest idea of what had to happen
before and after the printing. But we asked and we learned. Many people gave us
helpful advice, warnings, and guidance. Poets with long experience of
self-publishing, editors with ten short-lived magazines to their credit,
booksellers, and publishers, they all made time to tell us how it worked. I guess we
seemed so young to them, just a pair of kids, so keen to learn and make it happen,
they must have been moved by a fatherly concern, or by the hope that our naïveté
would alchemically transmute their own failures, and bring about the long-delayed
triumph of poetry, love, and revolution.

Of course, once we gathered all the necessary information and began to do the sums,
we saw that it wouldn’t be so easy. The obstacle was economic. The rest we could
manage, one way or another; we didn’t lack self-confidence. But we had to have the
money. And no one was going to give it to us just like that, as we realized when our
first timid appeals came up against an impenetrable barrier. In those days, there
weren’t any funding bodies that you could apply to for publishing grants. Luckily,
our families were well off and generous (up to a point). We had another advantage
too: intrepid youth, without burdens or responsibilities, taking no thought for the
far-off tomorrow. We were prepared to stake everything we had, without hesitation.
That’s what we were doing all the time, in fact, because we were living from day to
day.

We managed to scrape up enough money to pay for the first issue. Or we anticipated
that we would have the right amount when the moment came to pick up the copies from
the printer. Reassured on that account, we set about gathering, organizing, and
evaluating the material. Since our ideas and tastes coincided, there were no
arguments. We let our imaginations run wild, invented new provocations, discovered
new authors, laid claim to the forgotten, translated our favorite poets, composed
our manifestos.

But although we were deeply absorbed in the intellectual aspect of the enterprise, we
didn’t forget about the money. Not for a moment. We couldn’t have, because
everything depended on it, not just the existence of the magazine, but also its
physical appearance, the illustrations we could include (in those days, anything
other than type required the use of costly metal plates), and especially the number
of pages, which was essential for any calculation. At the printers they’d given us a
provisional “cost schedule” for various sizes and quantities of pages, in different
combinations. The quality of the paper, it turned out, made very little difference.
There could be thirty-two pages, or sixty-four, or . . . The printers worked with
numbers of “sheets,” which was something we never fully understood. Mercifully, they
simplified the choices for us. We took it on ourselves to complicate them.

We thought long and hard about the frequency of publication: monthly, biannual,
triannual? Had it been simply up to us, dependent only on our zeal, we would have
made it fortnightly or weekly . . . There was no shortage of material or enthusiasm
on our part. But it all depended on the money. In the end we adopted the view of
Sigfrido Radaelli, one of our obliging advisers: literary magazines came out when
they could. Everyone accepted that; it was the way things were. When we accepted it
ourselves, we realized that irregularity would not oblige us to give up our idea of
selling subscriptions. All we had to do was change the formula from a period of time
(“yearly subscription”) to a number of issues (“subscription for six issues”).

Recounting all these details now, they seem absurdly puerile, but they were part of a
learning process, and maybe a new generation is repeating these lessons today,
mutatis mutandis
, as the love of poetry and knowledge is eternally
reborn. The prospect of having subscribers and, more generally speaking, the desire
to do a good job led us into an area of greater complexity. The general perspective
was important: we felt that whether or not our readers were subscribers they were
entitled to a product that would continue over time. The subscribers would be
more
entitled, of course, because they would have paid in advance.
Continuity mattered to us too. We were depressed by the mere thought that our
magazine might decline or dwindle with successive issues. But we had no way to
insure against it. In fact, there was no guarantee that we’d even be able to get
enough money to print a second issue. With admirable realism, we left sales out of
our calculations. Even more realistically, we anticipated a diminution of the energy
that we’d be able to devote to bothering our families and friends for money . . .
Basically, the question was: Would we be able to bring out a second issue of
Athena
? And a third? And all the following issues, so as to build up a
history? The answer was affirmative. If we could get the first issue out, we could
get the others out as well.

I don’t know if we hypnotized each other, or were led to believe what we wanted to
believe by our fervent commitment to literature, but we ended up convincing
ourselves. Once we were sure our venture would continue, we felt we could indulge in
some fine-tuning. Our guiding principle was a kind of symmetry. All the numbers of
the magazine had to be equivalent to the others, in number of pages, amount of
material, and “specific gravity.” How could we ensure that? The solution that
occurred to us was curious in the extreme.

We’d noticed that literary magazines often brought out “double issues”: for example,
after number 5, they’d bring out 6–7, with twice as many pages. They usually did
this when they got behind, which wouldn’t be the case for us, because we’d already
opted for irregularity. But it gave us an idea. Why not do it the other way around?
That is, begin with a double issue, 1–2, not with double the pages, though, just the
36 we’d already decided on. That way, we’d be covered: if we had to make the second
issue slimmer, it could be a single issue: 3. If, on the other hand, we maintained
the same level, we’d do another double issue, 3–4, and we’d be able to go on like
that as long as the magazine prospered, with the reassuring possibility of reducing
the number of pages at any time, without losing face.

It must have occurred to one of us that “double” was not an upper limit; it could be
“triple” too (1–2–3), “quadruple” (1–2–3–4), or any other multiple we liked. There
were known cases of triple issues: rare, admittedly, but they existed. We hadn’t
heard of anything beyond triple. But there was no reason for us to be deterred by a
lack of precedents. The whole aim of our project was, on the contrary, to innovate
radically, in the spirit of the times, producing the unusual and unheard-of. There
were practical reasons, too, why the double-issue solution didn’t merit our
immediate adhesion. From a strictly logical point of view, if we had to cut back,
who was to say that we would have to cut back by exactly half? It would have been
very strange if we did. Our publishing capacity could have been reduced by lack of
funds, inflation, fatigue, or any number of accidents, all unforeseeable in their
magnitude as well as their occurrence, so we might well have had to cut back to less
than half . . . or more. That’s why starting with a triple issue (1–2–3) gave us
more flexibility: we could cut back by a third, or by two thirds, so the second
issue could be double (4–5) or single (4). But if, as we hoped, we managed to
sustain the momentum, the second issue would be triple again (4–5–6). There was
something about this speculation, so lucid and irrefutable (given the premises),
that excited us and carried us away, as much as, or even more than, the rushes of
literary creation itself.

We wanted to do a good job. We weren’t as crazy as it might seem. After all, editing
a literary magazine, the way we were doing it, is a gratuitous activity, rather like
art with its unpredictable flights of inspiration, or play, and for us it served as
a bridge between the future and the childhood we’d just left behind. Though we
hadn’t left it behind entirely, to judge from our abstract perfectionism, so typical
of children’s games. To give you an idea . . .

The triple issue ruled out the possibility of cutting back by exactly half. That
possibility, with its strict symmetry, was, we had already decided, very unlikely to
correspond to reality, but we were sad to be deprived of it, even so. Especially
since there was no reason to deprive ourselves of anything: all we had to do was
start with a quadruple issue (1–2–3–4), that way we’d still have the possibility of
cutting back by half (the following issue would be double: 5–6), or if our means
were not so far reduced, we could cut back by just a quarter (and follow the
inaugural quadruple issue with a triple: 5–6–7), or if our laziness or lack of
foresight or circumstances beyond our control obliged us to do some serious
belt-tightening, the second issue would be a single: 5. If, however, providence was
kind, we would bring out another normal, that is, quadruple issue: 5–6–7–8.

It’s not that we thought, even for a moment, of producing a first issue three or four
times thicker than the one we had at first envisaged. Those initial plans remained
intact, and they were very reasonable and modest. We never thought of making it any
bigger; our first issue, as we had designed it, with its thirty-six pages, seemed
perfect to us. The texts were almost ready, neatly typed out; there were just a few
unresolved questions concerning the order (should the poems and the essays be
grouped separately or should they alternate?), and whether or not to include a
particular short story, whether to add or remove a poem . . . Trifling problems,
which, we were sure, would resolve themselves. If not, it wouldn’t matter much: we
wanted
Athena
to have a slightly untidy, spontaneous feel, like an
underground magazine. And since there was no one breathing down our necks, we took
our time and went on calculating for the future.

All this was notional, which gave us free rein to speculate boldly. It was like
discovering an unsuspected freedom. Maybe that’s what freedom always is: a
discovery, or an invention. What, indeed, was to stop us from going beyond the
quadruple issue to make it quintuple, or sextuple . . . ? Beyond that, we didn’t
know the words (if they existed), but that in itself was proof that we were entering
territory untouched by literature, which was the ultimate aim of our project. We
were embarking on the great avant-garde adventure.

If we presented the first issue of
Athena
as a “decuple” issue—that is,
numbers 1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10—we would, at one stroke, secure a marvelous
flexibility with regard to the size of future issues. We’d be covered against all
contingencies, able to cut back in accordance with our straitened circumstances,
without having to resign ourselves to gross approximations. If the cost of the first
issue was a thousand pesos (an imaginary sum, solely for the purposes of
demonstration), and it was a decuple issue, and if we ran short for the second and
could muster only seven hundred pesos, we’d make it a “septuple issue”
(11–12–13–14–15–16–17). If five hundred pesos was all we could get, it would be a
quintuple issue (11–12–13–14–15); but if we raised a thousand pesos again, it would
be another decuple (11–12–13–14–15–16–17–18–19–20). And if our utter idleness
prevented us from collecting more than one hundred pesos, we’d make the next issue a
single: 11. The “single” issue, containing a single number, would be as low as we
could go. Whatever the first issue was would be “normal.”

We found these fantasies exhilarating, as I said, and it’s true. Even today, so many
years later, writing these pages, I can still feel some of that exhilaration, and I
still understand it as we did back then: this was the world turned upside down, and
we were venturing into it with the exuberance that the young bring to everything
that happens in their lives. Wasn’t that the definition of literature: the world
turned upside down? At least, of literature as we imagined it and wanted it to be:
avant-garde, utopian, revolutionary. We delighted in the idea of swimming against
the current: dreams are usually dreams of grandeur, but ours were of smallness, and
they were dreams of a new kind: dreams of precision and calculation, poetry adopting
the unprecedented format of real equations. We thought of our project as the first
literary version of Picabia’s mechanical paintings, which we adored.

We continued on this route, spurring ourselves on. Why should we be limited by the
number ten? There was, perhaps, a practical, concrete reason. It determined a
minimum number of pages if we had to economize drastically: three. A magazine of
fewer than three pages (which is how many it would have if, at some point,
compelling economic considerations forced us to bring out a single issue) would not
be a magazine. A practical, concrete limit wasn’t going to hold us back, but we
complied with it provisionally, and put it to the test. We found two holes in the
reasoning that I have set out schematically here. First, there
could
be a
magazine of fewer than three pages. It could consist of a single page. And, more
important, a tenth of our decuple issue wouldn’t be three pages, but 3.6, since the
inaugural issue of
Athena
would conform to the printers’ standard format
that we had adopted as our norm: thirty-six pages.